Back in November, City of Heroes developer Cryptic sold all of its interests in City of Heroes/Villains to NCSoft. The speculation was that Cryptic wanted to devote all of its time and energy to the Marvel Universe MMO which it was developing for Microsoft. Except this month, Microsoft went ahead and announced that it was ending development on the Marvel Universe MMO. WTF?
The odd thing is that Microsoft flak Shane Kim strongly implied that the reason they killed the Marvel MMO was that they did not believe they could achieve World of Warcraft-like subscription levels with it. Maybe someone finally showed them City of Heroes/Villains subscription numbers, which are in the 140,000 area.
My wife and I played CoH for a couple months and the game was fairly good, but the interface was absolutely awful. A well-done superhero MMO, especially with the Marvel license, could certainly expand on COH’s numbers, so it is a bit odd to see Microsoft of all companies throw in the towel.