Before NCSoft closed down City of Heroes developer Paragon Studios last August, a core group of developers in the studio was making a last ditch effort to buy the company back from its publisher, along with the City of Heroes IP.

"Things looked like they were going to go well and then things just kind of stopped going well," former Paragon lead designer Matt Miller told Gamasutra. "I'm not exactly sure where the sticking points were, but in the logistics of business there's always some sticking point somewhere [on which] people just aren't willing to budge and I think that's where we ended up. There were one or two points where neither side could budge."

Miller said that they worked right through the night before the studio closed and were one signature away from a sale, but in the end, it fell through. If the buyout had occurred, Paragon planned to keep the City of Heroes IP, a property it took over when NCSoft bought it from original developer Cryptic Studios, and ended up loving as much as the fans. Paragon had two other unannounced IPs that it would have also kept, but they still remain with NCSoft.

"We did want to do a Kickstarter," Miller said. "And we had some fantastic ideas for that Kickstarter, but at the end it just didn't work out. It was funny because the players were in as much shock as any of the developers--and they were like, in all the forums and on private messages on Twitter, 'Why don't you try X, or Y, or Z? Have you thought about doing a Kickstarter?' Things like that.

"Of all of them I've read, none of them were something we didn't already try ... It just didn't work out."