Article by Kevin Parrish
 
Following rumors that the developer was shutting down, Flagship Studios announced massive layoffs and put its upcoming RPG Mythos on hold. Now the company is battling its creditors for the Mythos and Hellgate: London intellectual properties.
 
http://www.tomsgames.com/us/2008/0 [...] ip_mythos/

 
 
And another one bites the dust...
 
Shame, as Hellgate : London could of been good, online updatable payable content seems the way that game companies will survive, but as this was rushed out buggy then its an insult even to contain the name London in it..
 
Oh well, looks like Steam is our only hope.....

 
Dang, i did liked Hellgate, it just needed a lot of fixing. Whos next ? Adventurine ? pffff..........

Yea i also was disappointed in hellgate, but I still bought at as did about 15 of my friends. I was under the impression that hellgate did pretty well sales wise for a while. I was suprised to hear the original story about how bad it was going over that flagship. I knew the game was going kinda shaky, but unaware that the company was resting on it. Its really to bad as the game had so much potential. I wish the dev members best on future endeavors.  
 
Best,
 
3Ball

 
Like Diablo III, i hope they ride that way for two reasons:
 
1 - Historicly
2 - More devs, less time to develop !!!!
 
Talking about D3, im gonna get my Tinfoil Hat. And start running naked here at the office, or...not,

 
Sounds good to me man...well maybe not the last part! lol, I dont know what I would do if one of the other techs did that here... lol
 
Best,
 
3Ball

 
 
But the idea was that they made money on subscriptions...
 
Sell a game for 50-60 dollars and make 20 dollars a month subscription
 
over a year obviously 240 dollars....  So no one plays it after 3 months loss of 180 dollars revenue in its first year..
 
Now this was down a non sustainable budget for which the game had to be rushed out therefore loosing the playability testing it needed so badly...
 
End result company looses credibility and money that it is in the same AMD waters...

Here's a positive update. The Hellgate forums did not go offline after all, and now it seems that Namco Bandai is involved with keeping the service afloat (link). Here's their announcment on the forum:

 
 
I don't think hellgate was designed with subscriptions totally in mind, as you can experience 75%+ of the games' content without a subscription. I think the problem likely had a great deal more to do with Electronic Arts skimming off way too much of their gross profits and not leaving enough to keep their online service paid for in addition to their staff. Anyways, the subscription for hellgate was like 10$ a month if I recall correctly; but yea.
 
Anyways, I think that ultimately they just didn't realize how much cost there was associated with the game, and EA likely pushed it to market before it was complete. This happens a great deal with big publishers like EA and THQ - so it wouldn't surprise me if the same happened here.

Yeah, that's my guess too. They should have taken 3 or 6 more months to fix the bugs before release. The effort of 5 years wasted because they couldn't make it 5.5 years... This is sad.

My best wishes to the developers. I'm sure this is not their fault. Maybe Blizzard can hire most of them and deliver Diablo 3 faster...

It also didn't help them at all that they released at a time when the 8800GTX was king of the hill and its drivers were garbage. I built my current PC for Hellgate last year, and I had to deal with crashes caused by Hellgate itself as well as those caused by nVidia. That was really bad luck.