As in a few other MMORPGs, players were required to subscribe to "City of Heroes" by paying the publisher (NCsoft) a monthly fee to continue playing "City of Heroes". Portions of the subscription costs went to supporting a full-time "live" team, which developed additional content for the game; other portions supported the significant server maintenance and bandwidth costs. The subscription fee after Issue 6 covered play in either of the games in the "City of" franchise or both of them at once for the same cost. However, since merging the titles in 2008, this became a moot point as any player of one of the games could access the opposite game without purchasing it.