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Sunday Comics: Dead Island Korean publisher HanbitSoft is finally ready to reopen Hellgate, Flagship Studios’ online multiplayer tale of demonic invasion, in North America. Closed beta for the free-to-play game launches in early June, with a full release coming later this year.
Hellgate: London‘s development, like its eventual implosion, was epic. At GDC, Stephen Goldstein, Flagship Studio’s ex-director of business development, explained just how what seemed like a guaranteed hit went horribly, regrettably wrong.
Cryptic Studios hired Bill Roper, former Director of Blizzard Entertainment and co-founder of Flagship Studios , as the company’s Design Director, they announced today.
Will the last Templar Guardian please turn off the lights and do whatever it is that you do to auras that makes them stop glowing – Hellgate: London is shutting down.
Poor Hellgate. It promised so much, and delivered so little. So little, in fact, that it drove developers Flagship Studios out of business. As the mourners file slowly away from the studio’s funeral and make their way towards the free finger food and drinks, it’s time to reflect on just why Hellgate never made it. Creator Bill Roper has a fairly good idea:
Some of them were just bad timing in the PC market. The PC market was lousy last year. Some of it was the fact that we were an independent studio. We didn’t have unlimited money, and we had to ship when we had to ship. Part of it was because we overreached, and that was a design problem that was totally our fault. We tried to do too much. We tried to be a standalone game and a free-play game and an MMO and an RPG and a shooter. We were trying to be something for everybody and ended up really not pleasing many people at all….
Sounds about right to us! Bill Roper: ‘Hellgate Wasn’t As Good As It Should Have Been’ [1UP]
Namco-Bandai may be stepping in to rescue Hellgate: London from embattled Flagship Studios, who recently suspended private testing for Mythos in the wake of widespread reports that the studio was shutting down.
We’ve approached Flagship for comment and they’ve yet to explain their status to us. Then, a posting appeared on Hellgate‘s official forums from Namco-Bandai’s senior director of business development, Zack Karlsson, stating:
Hello Hellgaters,
I know everyone is looking for an announcement, and we’d love to make one — but right now, many things are in flux and we don’t have all the information yet. As soon as we do, we’ll post here on the forums, on the website, and anywhere else we can find you.
The posting continued:
Flagship Studios has reportedly suspended private beta testing for Mythos, shutting down the game’s servers and message board — but not before an official explanation was posted on the forums by Flagship co-founder and COO Max Schaefer:
Unlike most games, Mythos has been running with our testing community for almost its whole life. I really feel like we’ve all done this together. And despite this bump in the road, I think we’ve succeeded wildly. This is undoubtedly the best game community I’ve ever seen. This is the best game development team in the world, in both Seattle and San Francisco. The things we’ve learned here, and with you all, will be with us forever”.
Word started passing yesterday that Flagship Studios went caput, and now multiple sites are reporting word that the Hellgate developer is indeed no more.
We got an anonymous tipster who said Flagship shut down abruptly yesterday, and that developers for both Hellgate (San Francisco) and Mythos (Seattle) have all been pink-slipped. “But there’s also hope that they will all have their jobs back at the end of next week at a brand new company”, our tipster says.
But wait, there’s more. Flagship’s Korean partners/owners, Hanbitsoft, were said to be taking over. That sparked a foofaraw regarding who owns the Hellgate intellectual property.
What happens at the studio when a game doesn’t sell as well as was hoped? Imagine being at Flagship Studios after Hellgate: London‘s launch stumbles, which 1UP identified as “one of the top 5 worst PC game launches of all time”. Angry PC gamers even invented a special term, “Flagshipped”, to refer to when a company overpromises and doesn’t deliver.
If you think morale might suffer on the team, a blog entry from Flagship Studios audio and gameplay manager Guy Somberg suggests you might be right. Somberg said on his blog that work had become “depressing” because of fan response to Hellgate‘s issues. (The original post has since been pulled, but MMO fansite IncGamers retrieved it.)
Although Somberg wrote that he loved being part of Flagship, he also expressed a fair bit of worry about many of his colleagues moving on from their jobs:
From worst to first! Just last month, Flagship’s Hellgate: London made 1UP’s list of the top five botched PC game launches of all time, with regular server crashes and people being billed multiple times for premium subscriptions. The Southeast Asian launch went even worse, with Infocomm Asia Holdings nearly wiping all player progress within the first 30 days of launch. It’s amazing what a few months can do, because now Hellgate: London is being touted as Korea’s most successful online game launch in 3 years. There are over a million active accounts, and the game is the 9th most-played game in the country. Sheesh. “To become the most successful launch in Korea for over three years is an incredible achievement,” said Bill Roper, CEO of Flagship Studios.
“This milestone wouldn’t have been possible for us to achieve without the incredible support of our publishing partner, Hanbitsoft, and our dedicated community in Korea.”
Wow, that Hanbitsoft must have the most magical marketing team ever! Hit the jump for the press release, which actually contains the words ‘Hellgate”, ‘Successful’, and ‘Launch’, all in the same spot.
