Flagship Studios closed it's doors today.

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Kangg

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Just read that it is official Flagship Studios closed it's doors today.:eek:
Don't know what this means yet for Hellgate London. Supposedly Mythos is still going ahead.

http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/3...losure-Confirmed-All-Staff-Fired-All-I-P-Lost

Flagships's Community Manager, Taylor Balbi, has revealed, through sources, that all Ping0 and Flagship Studios staff have been made redundant. Employees were notified at a company meeting and subsequently informed that the offices will be officially closed on Saturday. Balbi went on to reveal that three of the studio's top brass dug into their own pockets to provide 30 days of pay to all employees.

Word of the studio closure reached Korean distributor HanbitSoft, leading to the release of a statement regarding intellectual property control and the subsequent clarification by their American lawyers that included the following sentence: "It is unfortunate that Flagship turned down additional investments HanbitSoft offered to make that would have allowed it to keep its doors open."
As also referenced in the legal release, HanbitSoft hopes to independently continue development of Mythos, to which it owns the rights thanks to a loan agreement enacted with Flagship. Comerica now owns the Hellgate: London rights through a similar loan agreement, and will likely continue Asian development with HanbitSoft. As for English-language releases of the two games, it is possible that the Asian companies would continue development, though in the case of Hellgate: London it is unlikely (Mythos has a far better business model and is attracting extremely positive press). Alternatively, the rights may be sold to Electronic Arts or other interested parties. In summary,


Flagship's well is dry, all intellectual property has been lost, all staff fired, and the studio closed. It truly is the end of the line.
 
Meh. The game had much potential but wasn't spectacular. It was repetitive in the bad way, not like Diablo 2 (where it was still fun). I'm talking about Mythos of course. I have played off and on since beta, and always felt like the game wouldn't succeed. Those games are such a niche market, for lack of a better term. Sure, they attract some players, but only a small handful compared to what more commercial games attract.

I think their problem was in marketting...not enough research on their part to see what the target audience was/what the target audience wanted.

EDIT: for anyone that wanted to try the game, I am giving my account away to the first person that PMs me. I have taken the liberty of changing all my personal info for my safety.
 
maybe next time they make a game they will used more than 4 tile-sets. Sorry but I have alot of contempt for HGL, it could have been much more, and it seems like they didnt really care about what they had you buy.

Good Riddance.
 
HGL was good right at the beginning of the game... and then not even 2 hours I realized that the game really had nothing special to it. It was just a boring grind of the same levels over and over.

If you are going to rush crap to the market, expect to fail.
 
cnick79 said:
Damn you pirates, Damn you! Look at what you did.
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Not the work of Pirates. Even the developers have admitted that the game sucked. see here (source):
Further Confirmation: A person going by the name of GLC (“Kalan Kier”, former Ping0 QA Manager.) who is claiming to be a former employee of Ping0 has made the following post on SomethingAwful to further confirm the company’s demise:

Former Ping0 employee checking in here. I feel bad for some of the talented guys on the staff who busted rear end to try and get a game out on a ridiculous schedule, but I think we all kind of saw this coming after the game came out and basically bombed. Flagship bit off way more than they could chew and made a lot of development and structural mistakes in how they went about things. They had a lot of big dreamers on staff, but not enough nitty-gritty people who knew how to get shit done. It sucks, but that’s life I guess. I didn’t always agree with the decisions of the leadership, but it doesn’t surprise me at all to hear that three of them (probably Roper and the Schaeffers) dug into their own pockets to pay people. Nothing about them, Max Schaeffer in particular, ever made me think they were less than standup guys.

I think it’s less that they aimed too high than that they tried to aim that high and do it quickly, and they didn’t do anything the easy way. They had their own server architecture, their own client, their own chat, their own graphics engine, their own everything basically. Plus they wanted a game that could support thousands of concurrent connections with no downtime, had an engaging single-player campaign, and could support an ongoing, persistent world. It was like picking everything that’s hard to do in a game, and then putting it on a brand-new company (two of them, really) with people who hadn’t worked together before.

Plus you had Ping0 doing the back-end and multiplayer, working off a forked codebase, and trying to make sure that what they were designing was open enough that it could be marketed to other companies. And then Mythos, with a team working out of Seattle under Travis Baldtree (who is a fucking genius, by the way), which had to fit into things somehow even though it wasn’t as much of a priority. It was just a really chaotic situation all around. Hopefully the talented guys I met there will bounce back quickly, it’s a lovely time to be unemployed in the bay area.
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Hellgate;London is just like Vanguard, a game with great potential and original ideas but could not all be put together in reality like they would have hoped. Then both games release with tons of bugs and issues, which will kill a fan base A.S.A.P.

I think Blizzard is so succesful because they have deep pockets to allow their games to stay in development for as long as they feel need. Blizzard will NEVER rush a game to meet a release, they have no problem delaying one full year if they need, and feel that delay will help iron every bug and polish the game to a diamond.

Most other companies have strickt deadlines to meet and finished or not release the game anyways, and hope they have a early rush of sale then plan to patch/fix the game over the months but usually that never works out well in the long run.


With news of EA rushing out WarHammer Online for sure this Fall, I am sad to say I see the same thing coming for them, the game needs a solid 6 months still before retail release to get polished, and now they announced only 2 major cities in the game, instead of the original 6, not looking good already
 
What really killed the fan base was last Summer the big shots decided to tack a monthly fee onto the game, if you want the full experience :rolleyes:

Not every fucking RPG should have a fee, and that pissed off a lot of players. Flagship got greedy and thought they could get on the WoW gravy train
 
Good riddance indeed.
Interesting that Taylor Balbi is now claiming that he said no such thing and that Flagship is not closing it's doors, despite all of the team members who updated their resumes to say they were no longer employed there.
 
will my hellgate keep working.. or is it truely done.. I wont be able to play it anymore? I dont want to install it and find its a no go. I had to re format lol.
 
Single Player should work.


Anyways.....I saw this coming a long time ago. The game was just terrible and lacked any sort of polish. Even now I still think the game feels like it is in Beta. It runs like crap and eats up over 2gb of memory just to open up your inventory sometimes.
 
It's a shame that they had to close down. The game was average at the beginning and there are a lot of core things done wrong that can't be changed - but with a couple of patches and hard work the game was improved quite a lot.

I have enjoyed HG:L single player with the 1.2 patch a lot. Hopefully the 2.0 patch for single player will still surface at some time. Zombies, fire arms, random levels and item collection are an irresistable combination for me. :D
 
Zorachus said:
What really killed the fan base was last Summer the big shots decided to tack a monthly fee onto the game, if you want the full experience :rolleyes:

Not every fucking RPG should have a fee, and that pissed off a lot of players. Flagship got greedy and thought they could get on the WoW gravy train
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....ooooor they were just trying to recoup costs. Nah, you're right, it was terrible, terrible greed on their part.
 
Can someone explain to me the difference between Arenanet's Guild War's and Flagship's Hellgate?

Arenanet came up with their own Battle.net from the ground up, to support Guild Wars which turned out to be a success. Flagship had Ping0 to support Hellgate...

Why did Guild Wars succeed and Hellgate flop? They seem like the same type of game to me.
 
zsec said:
Can someone explain to me the difference between Arenanet's Guild War's and Flagship's Hellgate?

Arenanet came up with their own Battle.net from the ground up, to support Guild Wars which turned out to be a success. Flagship had Ping0 to support Hellgate...

Why did Guild Wars succeed and Hellgate flop? They seem like the same type of game to me.
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simple answer. They got the team combo right. They kept it simple and not aim for too much.

And oh, Guild Wars = no monthly fee.

That attracted a LOT of people. In the end they sold a lot and thus was able to get a good fan base. As revenue pours in they are able to make improvements. Last time i played guild wars was a year ago, and just started eye of the north. And my word a lot has changed to the party system, hero system, etc etc. They were able to slowly improve the game. And all be cause they kept it plain and simple at the beginning. Plus the fact that the name "Guild Wars" is cool, and I got interested towards it... so yeah that means they did their marketing right.

It does get boring but its one of those games you can play casually or hardcore
 
To be fair, guild wars doesn't have a monthly fee, but to get the "full experience," you have to spend $30-40 on an expansion pack every 6 months. You don't have to if you don't want, but you'll miss out on content, just as you did with not paying monthly for hellgate. Its a different business model but the same result, guild wars is just better at hiding the cost from people.
 
I think Blizzard is so succesful because they have deep pockets to allow their games to stay in development for as long as they feel need. Blizzard will NEVER rush a game to meet a release, they have no problem delaying one full year if they need, and feel that delay will help iron every bug and polish the game to a diamond.
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Dude, take off the rose colored glasses. Blizzard releases buggy games too. WoW was pretty bad when it first came out. :rolleyes: And 3+ years later, they're STILL trying to patch in class balance...badly.
 
Common sense rolls attack D24
Devs roll defence D1
Devs are critted for 9,999
Devs are critted for 9,999
Devs are critted for 9,999
Devs are critted for 9,999
Devs are critted for 7,104
Common sense gains 590,390 PvP experience points
Common sense is level 72
Common sense is level 73
Common sense is level 74
Common sense has gained new skill "how not to make crap games"
Devs morale is decreased by 9,999
Devs morale is decreased by 9,999
Devs morale is decreased by 1,383
Devs lose 1,890,314 PvP experience points
Devs is level 31
Devs is level 30
Devs is level 29
Devs is level 28
Devs is level 27
Devs has lost skill "Employment"
 
Spaceman_Spiff said:
To be fair, guild wars doesn't have a monthly fee, but to get the "full experience," you have to spend $30-40 on an expansion pack every 6 months. You don't have to if you don't want, but you'll miss out on content, just as you did with not paying monthly for hellgate. Its a different business model but the same result, guild wars is just better at hiding the cost from people.
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Except guild wars didn't suck out of the box and save fixes for expansions. Also, expansions, are full of significant new content. They have only released 3 expansions since 05, that's roughly 1 a year.
 
This announcement has definetley got me al ittle teary eyed. Not because I care about Hellgate London anymore, but I remember how excited I was in '05 when it was announced.

Seems like everything is going under these days. Looks like those harsh ecomonic times might actually be upon us.

http://www.thenextbench.com/hpg/blog?blog.id=hpblog


.
 
I couldn't give a shit less about hellgate, but I had a good time playing Mythos. I hope they still finish it. In any case, it still sucks to see people losing their jobs.
 
I do agree it sucks to see them losing their jobs, however after putting up with broken patch after broken patch coming out for Hellgate it doesn't surprise me one bit to see the game fail miserably. Every patch I can think of back to .7 came with a number of fixes and several new *major* bugs, some of which were rather horrific such as disappearing items in the 1.2/1.3 patches.
 
It is nice that the employees got 30 days pay at least. That would suck to get dumped like that.
 
I hope the Korean company takes over and keeps the game going. I still play HGL every day. Unlike what seems like everyone else, I actually liked the game.
 
hellgate1545570698.jpg


seemed like a good idea at the time...
 
Harkamus said:
What is that? Is that thing in the corner a Gremlin from Mythos?
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What you're supposed to be noticing is the giant pentagram from the HG:L box / game art in the middle of her back.

You can kinda see it here:

Hellgate_London_Cover_gross.jpg


 
haha tatoos are pretty stupid to start with, and thats a real exceptional example.
 
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