NCSoft has given City of Heroes: Homecoming an official license to operate its CoH server. The team confirmed the news and are sharing a FAQ on what this means for access and continued development.
City of Heroes: Homecoming is now an officially licensed server, and is available to jump in and play now. With the license, the team not only gets to run its server, they get to further develop the game under the limited license.
“This agreement provides a framework under which Homecoming can operate the game in a way that complies with NCSOFT’s wishes”, and they’re optimistic based on the Homecoming team’s relationship with NCSoft that this will minimize the chance that anything will happen to shut it down. Also, you can continue to stream content, even monetized, as long as there's no paywall.
The team is answering questions on what this all means, including new terms of service to agree to and the need to use the Homecoming launcher (at least, eventually). While there are details they can’t reveal, and some that they will be able to talk about later, ultimately, this official designation will give them plenty of room to continue bringing City of Heroes to the community that loves the game. As for other CoH servers, "Our hope is that our license will help us consolidate our userbase with City of Heroes fans from other servers".
Under the terms, the game will continue to be free, and accounts and characters will be safe on this official server. Becoming official doesn’t mean any rollbacks. Donations are the way the community can support the team if they choose to do so, including for some legal and other expenses involved in the deal.
While the new license doesn’t require the team to pay licensing fees upfront or in any recurring manner, they do foresee some increases in overhead. Further development means they’ll also expand the dev team, but everything will remain closed-source, as NCSoft controls and owns the IP.
Still, City of Heroes is such a beloved game that is still fondly remembered by many, and the Homecoming team has been working for four years. Now, with an official license, and development continuing, they’ve made themselves the CoH project to watch.
