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July 12th, 2008 @ 11:35
According to this Voodoo Extreme report, all Flagship Studios staff have been laid off and the Hellgate developer’s office will be officially closed down today. From the piece:
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.”
It would now appear that the firm has completely run out of steam, will all staff fired, IP lost, offices closed.
Flagship Studios: we salute you.
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July 12th, 2008 at 11:37 am
July 12th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Sad news indeed. Is Hellgate worth a punt?
July 12th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
No, Hellgate really was bad enough to kill a game studio.
It’s also the only game I can remember that required you to use the disc to uninstall it too!
Perhaps what’s happened to Flagship will act as a warning to future companies who release shoddy games?
July 12th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
As has just be mentioned to me: “It’s all about poor management. They had no design document, numerous high-paid managers, used their IP as security against loans, overspent, rushed the game out, and then never recouped any of it.”
Pretty conclusive, really.
July 12th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
What does this mean for Mythos then? That looked like it was shaping up well
July 12th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Honestly no idea. It can’t bode well, though, considering they haven’t got any staff any more.
July 12th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Hopefully Hanbitsoft enlists the Mythos peeps to continue working on it. Another ex-Diablo II developer group closing (Castaway is dead too now I guess, Click Entertainment as well), ArenaNet and L5 games are the ones that remain. Place your bets on the next one who is going down.