f13.net

Interesting tidbit from Gamasutra regarding Flagship Studios.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=19386

Hate it if true.  Was hoping they could turn HG:L around.

I saw that and it made me sad.  I'm subbed and play HGL more than any other game at the moment.   :heartbreak:  FSS is saying the HanbitSoft story is fake but who knows? 

Editedbecauseicantspellrite.

Oh right. I just want to say - who's laughing about my refund now?

Don't care about HG:L but I sure hope Mythos isn't impacted by this.

The people who never spent any money on a fourth-rate Diablo-clone in the first place?  :awesome_for_real:

/raisehand

Thank Christ for open betas. That saved me $50 at least.

Hellgate London should have never seen daylight. Mythos is where they should have gone all in.

I liked Hellgate's premise.  No elf ears and everything that comes with it.

I've had some really fun sessions with the game and was going to resub with 2.0 but now who knows if it will see the light of day this year.  Besides, the forums are more entertainment than any other mmo out there right now.

I've been subbed for a few weeks or so now and it's much more fun.  Some of the recent nerfs to MM have disillusioned me, however.  Mythos is cute and okay but does not keep me entertained for more than an hour or so.  I can go very long periods without logging in and I don't miss it at all.  It is cute, though.  HGL, however, has loads of potential for fun and I look cool in it.

I'll tell you honestly : I didn't give it more than 40-50 minutes, at best, during the open beta to figure it was shit. When your character looks and feels static and retarded after 15 seconds of movement, I'm there better be something else making up for it. And then I waited. After 10 mins and some combat with different classes I was ready to give up. I tried advancing and having fun, but a burdening feeling of suckage caused me to abandon all hope. Game was absolutely lacking in atmosphere, feeling, depth, interactivity, decent animations, particle effects, AI, interface and combat to name a few so why are people still rabbling about this piece of flamboyant poop. Just let it die. Diablo 3 is here Soon(TM).


Yup, thats all it ever was. Potential. Unfortunately wasted.

Never fuck with a Korean company's money and expect to keep your job.

This is looking pretty serious-- it's plausible that the koreans may actually have a claim to the FSS IP. Unfortunately that does include Mythos.

http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/39851/Hellgate-Developers-Made-Redundant-Korean-Distributor-Takes-Control

The mass layoffs are likely to be real too.

I linked all the way to that "rant" from their sole programmer. I genuinely feel  bad for the guy because it seems like he really wants things to work out when he knows they won't.

Same. I also really wanted them to do well, being a huge Blizzard North fan and Diablo fan. I'm still looking forward to trying Mythos though and just think of HG:L as a project gone wrong. Trial and error.

I want to have something to say about this, but I've already said it in other threads.  :uhrr:

I think Diablo 3 would've been the last nail in the coffin anyway.

That could be, I don't know, but Diablo 3 is Blizzard and they've just announced it so I reckon HGL would have AT LEAST five years to make a bit of dosh.  :grin:  I do think, however, that if HGL had been in a proper state when it launched, it would be doing alright.  Not WoW great or anything, but possibly decent. 

Too bad.  Another decent game idea where the devs bit off more than they could chew, released too soon, and have suffered the consequences.  THIS is why I think Mythic's pruning of classes and cities is a wise decision.

Some of us were smart enough to realize the game wasn't good enough to subscribe to it in the first place :drill:

From the updates in the past couple of hours, it really does look like the koreans are going to end up owning HGL (who cares?) and Mythos (I care). What a total bummer. If travis baltree and co aren't developing it, I don't have much hope in Mythos ending up a winner.

I imagine Travis would leave and make something better. Hell, he should.

(http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/9648/ssfdasfyn3.jpg)

(http://www.fortunecity.com/lavender/stroheim/163/titanic48.jpg)

Fuck 'em.  They can take their "let's charge MMO fees for pseudo-MMO online play" business plan straight to hell with them.

Where "hell" means "Korea", right?  :awesome_for_real:

Same. Thankfully few funbois here took one for the team so I didn't had to.

Can't agree more and for me this was top issue I had with Flagship.

Flagship Studios' Closure Confirmed, All Staff Fired, All I.P. Lost (http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/39866/Flagship-Studios-Closure-Confirmed-All-Staff-Fired-All-I-P-Lost)

Perhaps the lesson is "if you take a loan out on everything, be prepared to lose everything".

It seems incredible, to me, that Flagship put pretty much everything they had in hock to afford to get their products out the door, including the IPs.

Flagshipped indeed.

Crap.

Anyone knows an other casual friendly game?  Preferably with hordes of monsters and a decent loot system.

Diablo 2

(http://xs329.xs.to/xs329/08286/emot-master570.gif) (http://xs.to)

What is this "through sources" bullshit? Are there no direct goddamn quotes? Did they not take notes? Find me someone to choke!

i cannot believe Flagship only had one game to their name. Wtf seriously? That's IT?

Hum, they had 2 : HG and Mythos.

http://forums.hellgatelondon.com/showpost.php?p=1126324&postcount=1390

Yes, and he stands by his source, etc. I believe him. The biggest surprise here is whoa, voodooextreme is still around?

I'm confused.  Someone tell me if they are gone or not.

They've gone to plaid.

Heh.  Tiggs is trolling the official forum not giving a shit.   :drillf:

Although the rebuttal isn't actually denying the veracity of the report, he's just saying it didn't come from him...

I noticed that, too, Iain.  That's been the way they've handled it mostly so far.  They close threads for "misinformation" but they don't give you any information.  Also, you can no longer change your billing info or cancel your account.  At least I can't.  The "subscription" link has gone poof!

I can, however, log in and play.   :awesome_for_real:

Take the source of this follow-up with a whole bag of salt, but....

http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/39866/Flagship-Studios-Closure-Confirmed-All-Staff-Fired-All-I-P-Lost

Update: A Goon by the name of GLC who claims to be a former Ping0 employee (thanks Hellgate Guru) has said the following on the SA Forums:

    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 poo poo 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 loving 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.

EDIT: Future dev houses should document this story from beginning to end and make it the clinical example of how feature creep can wreck your title.

And then there's this:

Guy Somberg’s Experience

    *
      Audio and Gameplay Programmer
      Flagship Studios

      (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Computer Games industry)

      February 2005 — July 2008 (3 years 6 months)

      Hellgate: London
      Mythos

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/9/2b7/2a7

People should really stop moving to San Fran to work on games.

Why?

Makes people who have to live Arizona jealous I imagine.

http://hellgateguru.com/ (http://hellgateguru.com/) Has consolidated all of the noise related to this.  If this is correct it looks like Mythos goes to Hanibsoft (ergo T3 entertainment) and Hellgate goes to Comerica Bank.  WTF a bank does with a intardweb game is going to be interesting depending on those interested in obtaining the IP.

I hope Travis leaves Hanbitsoft and makes his own game. That's less cartoon and more streamlined.

I think the lesson here is simple.

Don't ask for my money all half-ass and then deliver a half-ass game.

If it were that simple, every dev company would be Blizzard by now.  :awesome_for_real:

But yeah. Making games is hard and whatnot.

Well, no. The problem was pretty clearly stated in that SA post; they tried to develop everything in-house. In the end, they managed to create a server platform and client that functioned reasonably well and delivered basic gameplay mechanics (shoot monsters, get loot, repeat) that were fast and fun. But they had no time left to actually develop content, much less polish, leading to the release of a substantially unfinished game.

The game was substandard, so it didn't sell well, and for some crazy reason the founders decided to offer their intellectual property as collateral on loans rather than taking on investors and diluting their company equity directly, eventually leading to FSS losing their IP and having to shut down the company entirely rather than simply losing control from the top down. So in the end that equity was worthless anyway and they never got to see if Mythos would come up heads or tails. Sounds silly, doesn't it? But that's what it looks like to me.

All staff fired. All IP lost. End of the road. (http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/39866/Flagship-Studios-Closure-Confirmed-All-Staff-Fired-All-I-P-Lost)

If only someone would have posted that on the last page.

Oh. For some reason I thought that link was just about approaching doom, not The Total Confirmed End.

no wait I know what I did. I got that link here and then dropped it off here. Oh boy. I am such a tool!

Now you owe us another picture. Dance, monkey, dance!

(http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/1580/d31sn9.jpg)

(http://img244.imageshack.us/img244/1733/d32ch8.jpg)

(http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/4783/d33qx2.jpg)

(http://zombiehof.com/goor/f13/tip.png)

Maybe they didn't have a choice. We don't know if they did or did not try to court (more?) investors* or if that avenue had dried up for them. Or that the loan direction may have actually worked out if their subscription plan had worked like they hoped. (narf)

Or at least, I don't know...

I'm reminded of Richard Gariott selling out the Origin franchises to EA. Maybe it was one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time?  :awesome_for_real:

*or if taking Hanbi up on more money would have caused all this to happen earlier.

Come now, when's the last time Garriott had a good idea anyway?

Garriot didn't sell his IP, he sold Origin itself, the entire company. He had no choice, as the cost of floppy disks had bankrupted them. And of course EA promised they would be held separate, they were special, nobody would touch them, they could continue to create worlds, etc.

There's one big difference, namely that Garriot walked away with giant piles of cash to play "rich crazy fuck" with.  I don't think anyone involved with Hellgate is making out quite so well.

EDIT:  Also, Samp's D3 comic there is win.

 :heart:

Too bad. With some work HG:L could've went from a huge disappointment to a solid game. Too bad we have to wave byebye to Mythos as well; I don't even wanna see what kind of kawaiiiiiiiiiiiii pay-for-items grindfest they're going to turn it into.

In this day and age where the normal course of action would have been to sell all their stock and jump ship a month ago this is fucking standup up them.

Tis sad. Both for Flagship and Mythos.

Next time, no skill trees.

they didn't even put synergies in it did they?  :grin:

It's worthwhile to link this rant (http://www.flagshipped.com/2008/06/05/fss-senior-programmer-speaks-out) by Somberg. Flagship had been leaking people for a while.

Its always good to remember that people don't set out to make a bad game. There are people working on that game that tried their best and did the best they could, that believed in what they did but it just didn;t work out. And always theres this giant cancerous whale called WOW thats just leaving you fighting for the scraps and just sucks all the money that you could make away from you . It leaves you no chance at all. The oft reported fact that the management paid the staff out of their own pocket shows that there was something good in the workplace.

I'm coming to the conclusion that the best thing blizzard could do for the gaming induistry now would be to shut down WOW. Its not THAT good a game but its existance makes anyone else trying to break in pointless. Never going to happen but still

Agreed. So is hiring, managing, distributing, accounting and herding cats.

It never ceases to amaze me that too many game developers think they can do all of the above because they are decent at making games.  They have gone to school to learn to make games and then get a job, working their way up the food chain to eventually getting to direct their own project.

Having completed that, it somehow translates into them being able to do everything, HR, PR, office manager, distributor, salesperson, psychologist, astronaut, sociologist etc etc. 

Tweety wrote a good blog on how the gaming industry is not a special or unique snowflake a few weeks back.

See, Wheels are Round (http://eatingbees.brokentoys.org/2008/06/02/see-wheels-are-round/)

She's right.  I could make an MMO in my sleep.  Unfortunately, I have insomnia.   :drillf:

What was the point of that rant?

I don't know why anyone rants about anything to do with MMORPGs.  They're all a load of rubbish after a few months, anyway, fun or not.  Except for the ones that are rubbish right from the start.  RUBBISH.

No no, I mean I don't get that specific rant - is she saying that these people have been making MMOGs for a while now and still can't do it? Or did she miss the obvious - that part of the problem is it IS all the same people making the same mistakes in the same genre. Is there anyone surprised by that? And the comparison to theatre was left-field worthy. As I said, I didn't "get it."

Edit: Psychochild cleared some of it up in the comments I suppose. But I'm still not entirely sure as to the original point of the rant.

I disagree. Partly because I play WoW, and wouldn't like my MMOG of choice to go the way of the dodo, but also because I don't think it's subscribers would be apt to spend their subscription money on other MMOGs. Not the majority of their playerbase anyway. They are WoW players, not MMOG players.

I think the second half was her trying to complain that arguments like "game development is hard" aren't really true.   Though her argument for why it shouldn't be hard doesn't seem to tackle how to get from A to B to C on truly fixing the problem.

To show that she's a clueless idiot?

Her point is that because people can do X on a schedule (supposedly, I don't have any experience in her X) people should also be able to do Y on a schedule. She talks about other related things but that's the gist of it.

Edit: no do

Ok, good, I'm not crazy.

 :oh_i_see:

I haven't read the rant, and I generally like Tweety for other reasons, but the proper noun to follow clueless in this case is twat. Just FYI. Ironwood and our UK visitors would put the country back in it I suspect. Anyway, as you were.

Oh and I'm fucked off at FSS. I've been playing HG:L again, and enjoying it, since I have MMMORPG distraction syndrome, but now I'm abandoning my 2.0 test server characters and the MP game in general since I know now it's fucked. Still SP is fun with the 1.3 patch and as Signe says, "Dayum I look good".

Certainly will be interesting to see what happens with the game in the next few months.

Oh please add in a patch to allow TCP/IP play if they're taking the servers down at least.

Most programmers I know are lousy managers. Why? Because in their heart they don't want to be.

If you hear your boss say: "Well at some time I have to do a little programming project again" or he has his own little pet project where he still likes to do something (and in the process completely stalls the project due to lack of time), just run.

In MMO management there is just the Peter Principle at work.

I don't get the "programming is hard you know" meme either. There are countless of projects out there on a similar or larger magnitude that get finished on time and/or on budget. Granted there are also a lot of projects out there that fail miserably or spectacularly.

Thirdly I also don't get the whinging about WoW. Before WoW the projected market for MMOs was ten people and the neighbour's dog. You can make a viable MMO despite WoW, other studios have done it. Als the majority of people I knew, while still playing WoW would have quit if something other were to come around. When Lord of the Rings Online dropped a lot did.

It's not that all of the people are still satisfied with WoW, a lot just keep playing and wait for the next best thing. It is know harder because people expect more from an MMO than they did before WoW. You can't just launch a bug-ridden half-finished piece of crap any more.

Are you a programmer?

Are we now getting to the "if you are not a programmer/an engineer/'insert career of choice' you wouldn't understand how hard it really is" point?

I could give you an answer (yes I am a developer) but then we would just get on to the next bit which is "so are you a game developer then?" (Answer: I am not). This will just boil down to the tired old argument: should you or can you criticise something that you are not experienced in.

Quite frankly I don't like the assumption that game development - especially MMO development - is somewhat harder than other lines of business. That is just myth building and patting yourself on the shoulder. Game development is just usually being managed even worse than normal projects.

There are countless projects that involve hundreds or thousands of people, a budget of millions or even billions of dollars and run any number of years and are finished on time and/or on budget. Usually only the spectacular failures are reported however. For every Heathrow Terminal there are dozens of other projects that you wouldn't read about in the news ("another project finished on time, general public rejoices").

Finishing a project on time and/or on budget is not something magical, you don't need to study alchemy for it, you don't need to sacrifice farm animals to a lesser known evil god and no amount of "iÄ, IÄ, Cthulhu F'thagn" will help you either.

In my personal experience most projects that fail don't even fail because of the work, they fail because of the management and the group think involved in such projects. Or to put it another way in most cases the saying "Show me how a project starts and I will tell you how it ends" is unfortunately very true.

Most bad projects I know suffer either from the "nobody wants to hear the truth" or the "We have no clue what the truth is, either" syndrome or to put it another way people that desperately want or have to do a certain project come hell or high water. The former is done by a management that fears it might not get funded at all if they tell it how it is ("if we tell them the real cost and time involved they will not fund our project"), the latter is mostly lack of experience.

Such projects are more often than not based on overambitious project goals and deadlines and are as a consequence often underfunded and understaffed. Sooner or later the project is extremely late, over budget and the staff has been running in crunch mode right from the start. By then the management is basically counting on the funders being to committed to the success of the project to pull out. The end result is something like Vanguard that has to be launched because funding has dried up not because it was finished in any way, shape or form.

In normal companies projects like that usually get killed by Controlling long before they get to that point however.

The point is: project management is a full time job that should be done by experienced people just as development is. Many projects however treat it as an afterthought, as something that is to be done along the way and is frowned upon by the staff because it gets in the way of "real work" and hampers "creativity". Also many people in project management just get there by way of the peter principle and have no clue about (and often no real interest in) managing projects.

It usually isn't even planned into the project plan.

What they often fail to realize is that project management is not only management of schedules and deadlines or budgets. The process starts by answering the question: "What do we want to do and what can we achieve with the budget and staff that we have?" basically the things that need to be answered before I do schedules and budgets. Projects that succeed in answering that question in an honest way have a significantly higher probability of succeeding than those that don't. That process is most probably the hardest part of a project and can take months. If it is done correctly however the rest just falls into place.

It also gives you the arguments you need for talking to the customer/the one who shall fund your project. ("If you give us amount X we can do Y, if not we will not be able to do Y but we could do Z instead)

I have been in both kinds of projects in my career. Those that failed spectacularly and those that finished on time. The latter ones usually took a long time to clear up just exactly what we had to do, how it needed to be done and even if we could do it at all considering time, staff and budget available. If you only have money staff and time for a 5 bedroom house you shouldn't plan to build a cathedral and you shouldn't take on projects where you are expected to do just that.

So is MMO development hard? Yes it is, just like any other really big project where you do something new, where many people are involved and the budget is in the millions. Should that be an excuse for the amount of failures and bad games we see each year? In my opinion no.

Given the amount of software that is released late (or never released at all), overbudget, and buggy I would say your expectations are too high, and I'm not even talking about MMO development specifically. Despite the fact that many programmers wear the title "Software Engineer" programming is really not like engineering in the more traditional disciplines -- it's much more a mixture of art, craft, and engineering. When companies like Microsoft struggle with it mightily (e.g. Vista) you know it's not a simple problem to solve. In fact it might never be solvable with the current methodology for writing programs.

You can always say that it's "bad management" that caused a project to fail or do poorly but that's really just an easy way of assigning the blame -- it's like saying it's the CEO's fault if a company's doing badly. The actual reasons are much more complicated than that. Software is particularly hard and not like other engineering fields because of, among other reasons, the incredibly difficultly estimating the amount of time it takes to do certain tasks, the fact that it's as much a creative process and an engineering one (as mentioned above) and the fact that you can't just throw more bodies at a problem (aka the "mythical man month") like you can in some other engineering fields.

When you go back and look at failed projects you can usually figure out what went wrong. Unfortunately with software, as history has proven time and time again, that does not mean your next project is going to turn out any better. You can put as much top notch management and processes in place (like at Microsoft) but unless everybody is coding to a strict and detailed spec where there's basically no opportunity to make choices (i.e. you are just a glorified typist that understands how to write in a foreign language) you are still dealing with an inherently hard to predict and creative process and even at well managed companies problem may arise that are difficult if not impossible to recover from especially if there are hard deadlines in place.

Getting back to game development it's no coincidence that game companies that have a lot of experience and release games on their own schedule generally turn out better games than companies that are forced to release games on a particular schedule, even if they are well-managed. When you are forced to start chopping out parts of the game to met the deadline that always has a ripple effect on other parts of the code/game and things usually end up being out-of-kilter because of it. These large-scale MMOs that we've been talking about here tend to have more "moving parts" than your typical single-player game which just exacerbates the problem.

I'm hearing from sources that the developments over the weekend aren't as bad as they are being made out to be. Apparently there have been layoffs but there are still people working at Flagship. Sadly I don't have any direct corroboration of that to back it up, all I have is grapevine stuff.

Just for the record, I have no made even the slightest attempt to find someone to interview. We all know what happened with the game. It wouldn't be interesting or even remotely in the same drama arena as Vanguard. Unless they were sacrificing midgets to the sun god and Roper had a man in his stomach giving orders, I really just can't see any appeal there. Apologies. Also, I'm moving to Austin. Frankly, I can't bring myself to care about this situation.

Are you going to go the Richard Garriot's big annual do?  Or is that over? 

I second everything Jeff Kelly said. In reality estimating how long something takes is not that hard for most tasks, the problem is a culture that encourages low-balling.

Architecture is both creative and technical.  There's a great many projects that fail to meet deadlines, but it can always be pointed to the managers who don't understand the tasks they're managing, (oldschoolers who don't use computers or CAD and still type or have secretaries who email while they dictate.)  OR because they simply don't want to be managing ("I didn't go to school to manage people I went to school to design buildings!" is a very common complaint.). The ones that are on time don't do stupid shit like having the intern (guy out of school for < 4 years or still in school ) detail your framing and window connections at his own pace.

   Those projects that are not only on time but don't leak or fall down are also not "pushing the envelope" because that costs in all areas (time, budget and problems).  I suspect the same of software design.  If you're trying to break new ground, triple your estimates and then still prepare for overages.

Bad games are usually bad not because of the concepts but the execution and planning of those concepts. I think you are spot on about the seemingly unprofessional atmosphere surrounding most game studios.

I also back up what he said.  I've worked in small startups where R&D was vital, and yet whatever timeframe we suggested necessary, management wanted it in half the time, if not tomorrow.  I've also worked in other companies where, for regulatory reasons, the project design/spec/implementation and testing were exceedingly well documented, and project planning and timeline were treated with respect, and those projects were more likely to finish on time, barring sales/marketing intrusion with new 'must-have' features.

I also agere with Merusk; software engineering is not particularly different from architectural, mechanical, or any other engineering; there is some art to it, but most of it is a matter of copying customer requirements into a different language, whether that language is C++, AutoCAD, or whatever, in order to produce a building, object, or program that works the way the customer wants.

The only real difference is the age of software engineering in comparison to the others, and therefore the age and experience level of most of the practitioners.  I think companies that approach software development the same way they do hardware development (like the latter company above, which did both) are better off than those software-only companies that don't have benefit of experience from other engineering disciplines.

It sure suprises me a lot when the same people make the same mistake. Rather annoys me and still makes me want to throttle them.

It doesn't surprise me ever. These people are all doing the same thing through every development cycle and expecting different results.

When I was interviewing for gaming jobs in the summer of 2000 I could tell that most of the companies I was interviewing with would be out of business within a couple years, that's how obviously flawed they were. Even in 3 hours of interviews it was easy to tell that most of the staff was clueless and the products they were putting out were destined to be garbage.

Was project management the reason HG:L failed?

Was it poor general management of Flagship?

Was it an over-ambitious scope?

Was it feature creep?

Was it overpromising and underdelivering?

Was HG:L over-designed and under-resourced?

Was it charging a sub fee for a game in a genre where sub fees aren't common i.e. action RPG dungeon crawls?

Was it the compeition that was too strong?

Or was it a whole host of these factors (and others) combining?

Based on the things I've read, it looks like people enjoyed working for Flagship, but given where they are now, they failed badly in achieving their goals. The "MMOs are hard" is not an explanation for what happened, because there are enough MMOs out there who didn't fall into the same traps. If MMOs are hard, then those developing for them need to be prepared for them to be hard. MMOs r srs busnss.

And then there is the fact that new products always run the risk of failure. Even the best new products might not make it if other factors conspire against them.

Better project management would have probably helped HG:L, but to pretend it is the only reason that Flagship got scuppered is a bit near-sighted.

You still should have joined them. At least you would have ended up with anecdotes to tell in the unemployment queue.

So.  Did anyone manage a refund?


I am not trolling. Per se.  Only curious.

Me?

 :drill: what a day that was. I think his MO was just keep hammering the CS with emails demanding a refund and one day he nailed the epic refund.

It was like Diablo, but with real money. And more ragging on engrish types.

http://www.f13.net/index.php?itemid=620

good times. 

The degree of re-use in those other engineering domains is much higher I would think. Maybe that is due to the immaturity of the domain, but I think the argument can be made that software being infinitely flexible, highly integrated and resistant to real world constraints (where bad construction conveniently reveals itself by breaking) may be inherently harder to standardize. Of course software itself varies, a lot of business programming has strong inherent repetition which has allowed a high degree of automation / re-use.

One of my professors (now deceased) said there was a project to find out why software projects failed so often. The finding was that as soon as engineering ventured into "innovative" territory all the engineering disciplines tended to have a substantial project failure rate. So the observation that this projects flaw was demanding too many new systems within a single project is probably a good root cause.

Well I don't think that my expectations are high rather that most companies are just lowballing. Your first sentence sums it up rather nicely. People today expect Software to be "released late (or never released at all), overbudget, and buggy" that and that "you cannot plan software development" is common knowledge now, it is so ingrained into the public consciousness that most people don't even question the meme any longer.

But if software development is this unpredictable beast, then why do some companies manage to deliver consistently while others fail time and again?


I disagree. Software development is very much like classical engineering in that it combines "a mixture of art, craft, and engineering". The only difference is that most other engineering professions are a lot older and therefore more settled and there is more experience going around but you won't last long in any other engineering profession of you lack craftsman- or artisanship. That is the beauty of these professions in my opinion.


I do not want to assign blame but in my experience it is more often than not mistakes made in project management that let projects fail. Well let's not call them mistakes. Most people think that project management involves managing people and timelines and budget, everything that needs to be done AFTER the project has already started.

The hardest and most time consuming and most important part of the project is however already over by then. It is also the one most often neglected by management.

When you start a project, you as a project manager are entrusted with the money, the resources and the staff to do the project. But before you can start you have to clear up a few things.

What exactly is the purpose of the project, what product do we have to make? Many projects already fail at that point because that question never got cleared up.
Can we do it given the budget and time that we have, how much money and time do we need? Many more projects fail there.
If not what can we do instead? Many projects don't even get to that point

If you cannot answer any of the above questions you shouldn't even start. In good corporate cultures project managers can and are encouraged to refuse projects if they think that a project cannot be done.

Question Number 1 is the hardest part of any project be it software development or anything else. If you cannot answer that one, you won't be able to answer all of the other questions, you will also not be able to do any meaningful budget, time and staff planning. You won't know what you really need to finish the project and you risk making a product that the customer doesn't want (I use the term customer loosely, The customer is always the one who wants to buy or use your product be it a gamer or your boss)

The problem is that you are usually pushing the envelope, so you don't exactly know what it is you should be developing and how and your customer doesn't either. This is why everybody thinks software development is hard and unplannable because most projects ignore that part entirely. Consequently they do not know what it really is that they should be doing, how long it might take or how much money it will take. They also do not know what the highest risks for project failure are and what contingency plans are needed.

The whole requirements engineering profession was founded because of that. In big projects that alone can take more than a year, bear in mind that no coding has been done by then.

This phase of the project is also the phase in which most of the information about the product is gathered, researched, cleared up, exchanged and disseminated so ideally all of the people that are part of the project team should be involved or at least being kept in the pipeline. Getting somebody up to date after this process is finished is nigh to impossible because only a small part of that info gets written down.

Unfortunately in most projects that part of the project is done by senior management and sales so a huge amount of info is lost by the time the project work starts. Also since the people actually working on the project are not involved, the coarse timelines are usually planned by people that have no development experience. Or even worse ones that have but haven't done any development for the last 15 years. ("I once did program X in 1 month 15 years ago, so how hard can it be?)

Then there is the pressure of funding a project. The sentence I most often hear by managers is "If we tell our customer the real cost and time of development they won't do the project". So a lot of budget and timeline makeup is done in order to sell a project to an unwitting customer. So you end up with a project plan that looks good and sells well but is no longer connected with reality. By the time the customer realizes that he is already too committed to the success of the project and will be hopefully too afraid to cancel it.

This leads to really absurd situations like one I was involved in in one of my last jobs. Boss asks us how long we think a certain development might take so we tell him that according to the amount of work we needed to be doing and the other projects that had to be worked on, it would take us about a year. As an answer we got "Well that's nice but I already told our customer that we will be finished in 6 months".

All of that might sound tedious and unnecessary but as the one responsible for the project I need all of that information in order to represent the project correctly. I can then tell if there is a significant chance of doing it with the time and budget available, if not what can or should be dropped to do it. I have identified the biggest project risks and maybe even made contingency plans if any of that happens and the customer knows it and can then make an informed decision.

So in essence at least in my experience most projects fail because the question "Can we do it or what can we do instead?" is ignored or not even seen as important. It is also often done by people that don't really like management they just got promoted there

In this phase of the project there is the most potential for screwing up badly.

This is not only to blame on management however. Most engineers I know don't see that bit as important. Meetings with customers, design and planning meetings and requirements are often seen as "getting in the way of 'real' work". Since many of the middle management positions are recruited from engineering you get a lot of middle managers that think project management is unnecessary, gets in the way of work and only takes up valuable development time. It most often isn't even calculated into the project as expenses.

Many of the managers promoted by way of the peter principle don't even much like the management part and usually want to be part of the development team instead in some sort of important function. This usually delays the project even further because everybody keeps on waiting for them to free some time in their busy schedule.


This is not different from other engineering projects. After a certain amount of project time has passed there is no point in adding more people. If you are doing something nontrivial it will take six months to a year just to get the new people up to speed. Also estimating the time a task takes is hard for other professions as well. How do you plan something that you have never done before?

Well it was never my intention to argue that it is hard, it is. I just don't like it as an excuse for failure or to construct some sort of "software development is inherently harder than other professions" mythology.


You cannot expect success from the same people that have a history of failure. All of your processes don't help if you have still the same people managing the projects. Microsoft by the way is in my book a prime example of a company that refuses to deal with question number one. Vista is a prime example of that.

They have screwed up every big software project in the last 15 years. No OS launch went smoothly or on schedule. They couldn't even launch xp before scrapping most of what would have made it special (new shell, next generation file system, palladium etc.) and most products don't even work until the first or second service pack. All the while they get beaten by Apple and Google and other companies as far as time budget, features and amount of bugs is concerned.

Why should the next project suddenly work any better? The same people are involved, the same mistakes will be made if nobody is there to correct them. Then if it fails it will be shrugged off as "Well software development is hard and unpredictable" and the next project is run into the ground. In the case of Microsoft they just don't bother, they have enough money to burn and a quasi monopoly on OS and office software, they can afford to blow billions on a project like X-Box or Zune or Windows mobile. In other cases it was just somebody else's money that is now gone. But even that has no real consequence in game development you can screw up a few projects and still get hired or funded to work on the next pipe dream.

Public blowups like in the case of Sigil show that many more software projects keep lacking.


If you get at a point where there is no way forward just cancel the damn project. This is done all the time in traditional engineering. In normal companies that rely heavily on research and development 90% of all projects don't get finished, the remaining 10% have to be enough to sustain it that is what comes with pushing the envelope. In really successful companies this can rise up to 20% or more. Why do game developments have to drag on endlessly until money runs out?


Every company releases games on their own schedule. They did the schedule or at least accepted the deadline, they planned what had to get into the game or at least accepted the demands of the contractor, they knew how much money they had at their disposal. In case of Blizzard or other independent companies it was their own money and time so they had more freedom than companies that have to rely on external funding but it is not that other software companies don't have a choice either. They can simply refuse to develop something that they are not confident in making when the next publisher dreams about the big "WoW-Killer" for pong money. Blizzard had 30 million and 5 years for WoW, Rockstar blew 100 million on GTA IV. If you cannot muster up that amount of time and money you shouldn't plan on doing The second coming of WoW. It doesn't help either that most development studios suffer from reinventing the wheel and not invented here syndrome.

What you describe as force is often just the contractor who ran out of patience after two years and a few million dollars over schedule.

I said this above.  It also is the underlying thought behind Sanya's blog. Why are you reinventing the wheel Every. Single. Project.  Did some new technology occur that makes your chat system better/ different than every other chat system and IRC client on the planet?  Is there some fantastic interface dongle that mandates some sort of rewrite? No? Then why the fuck are you rewriting it?  The same question applies to every system that devs feel a need to rewrite from scratch, every time.

 I understand the need to extensivly tweak or re-write game engines, or net code, or anything else.  Sometimes the exsisting stuff just doesn't do what you need.  But you need to start with the exsisting and THEN determine if it does or doesn't work, not just scrap it from the start and keep making the same mistakes over and over.

http://www.thenoobcomic.com/index.php?pos=314

seemed apt, on more than one level.

This thread has fallen into a pit of uninteresting crap!   (http://smileys.on-my-web.com/repository/Sleepy/sleep-040.gif)

success has many fathers, failure is an orphan

Jeff Kelly = SirBruce

?

Given how fricking long that novel was, I didnt have enough mental RAM to remember whatever the hell Trippy had said that he was responding to, so I'm willing to cut him some slack on that one.  :grin:

Summary of Jeff Kelly's post: if more time was spent better (and realistically) planning a project and if said project didn't require cutting edge development and re-inventing the wheel every time, MMO development would probably be a lot more successful.

From some Tiggs post somewhere - Mythos or HGL, I forget:

Damn, she beat me to it.  Maybe they're working on a Tetris port? 

fixed it

So it's less Flagship sunk and all hands lost, more Flagship having gone underwater but the people still trapped inside have some air left?

Sorry for that wall of text there. I got a bit carried away there.

+ two of them are magical fish-people

Most of the MMO development firms are doing it for the first time, there is no pre-existing codebase that they can leverage.  Other then the graphics engine itself, my guess is that writing your own is veiwed as either being more cost effective then licensing someone elses.

If we're talking about design... well, we're talking about designers.  What designer could ever be talked in to, UPFRONT, agreeing that a chat, looking for group, or other bread-and-butter element done in another project was "good enough"?

Whenever someone says to someone else, "stop being human! stop having an ego!", I kind of just think, "yeah, and you're writing this article why?"

Mythos follows HG:L.  Shades of optimism or denial, time will tell I suppose.


From Travis Baldree via hellgateguru.com.

Translation: the useless C-level jobs are hanging around hoping to collect some venture funding and fail spectacularly once again.

Being someone who's a coder in the industry I believe I can point to one possible reason for why this keeps recurring.  A lot of people who code games see themselves as sort of above the cut compared to people who might code what they see as mundane things.  When something like the chat system comes up often it won't even occur to them to license already existing code.   A chat system is seen as trivial and the time taken to write one from scratch is heavily underestimated.

Even worse on more technical topics like coding relevant to the database will be seen as "high brow" enough for a game coder to tangle with.  Yet in reality they don't have the experience and will fumble or take too much time on the work.   This applies to management who are former coders as well.   You can even see some of this easily without even working in the field.   CCP has been pretty public about some of their backend stuff so we know that they use MS SQL and that the choice to do so was made by people who had no relevant experience in the field.

It's not just using existing code but even using existing techniques. Even if your chat system needs to be coded from scratch for some reason it's not like chat itself is some exciting new field that you have to blaze a trail in.

Most software devs think they can do better. They look at code and it isn't their coding style, or they don't like how it's organized, so they figure they should just do it themselves.

One thing that sticks out to me is the speed at which this happened.  Released last quarter of '07 and failed 2nd quarter or '08. 




:tinfoil:    Something about this just doesn't smell right.    :tinfoil:

It's a case of betting the house on one horse, imo. If HG:L had been a huge success, there wouldn't have been an issue.

Look at Fury - Auran thought it would successful and poured a lot of money into it. Fury flopped and it takes down the company with them.

Most game dev studios have enough cash (by hook or by crook) to get their current project out the door, but not a whole lot more.

That would probably be the stench coming off the game itself, no?

Weren't they also developing Mythos as well, as a "network test" for Hellgate?

Which never made any sense at all, they are creating a whole nother game to test Hellgate tech, and actually starting and delivering it *after* Hellgate is released?

That's right - Mythos was released as some sort of tech test / demo while HG:L was the main show. I thought it was weird that it was released so close to HG:L being shipped anyway - by that time, it would have been too late to iron out any major bugs.

It seemed to me that when HG:L flagshipped, they looked to Mythos as something else Flagship could hang their hat on.

Ya, the code for the irc server most of the net uses has been free to look at for over 10 years but still we get chat clients that aren't half as usable as irc.

replace the text on my original picture with 'lol I am a .. complicated, esoteric metaphor, possibly involving merfolk'

Between this and their stupid, over-priced subscription plan, it's what I've been smelling.  Other factors might play a role, and I don't like seeing anybody out of a job, but I hope it at least puts a steak in the heart of that bone-headed idea.

(sic)

Mmm. T-bone steak.

There's a company at steak!

(http://img364.imageshack.us/img364/4081/guysmileyxt5.jpg) (http://imageshack.us)




Whoa.

www.hellgateguru.com (http://www.hellgateguru.com) for the rest of this.

When does the class-action suit for lifetime subs start? Or weren't there enough dumbasses signing up for that quite obvious scam?  :awesome_for_real:

Your sub lasted the life of the game...

(http://i152.photobucket.com/albums/s183/ec1016/llama.jpg)

My work here is done.

That's the bitchiest PR statement I've ever read. It's delicious. :grin:

So Hanbitsoft is gloating, trashtalking, epeen waving AND corpse camping Flagship?  Class act there.  Sounds like they picked up the former Iraqi Minister of Information to write their press releases.  Maybe they can pick up Jack Thompson to do the stateside legal work?  Assuming JT doesn't get disbarred of course.

I'm no fan of releasing unfinished games, of calling Diablo clones "MMOs", or of the ridiculous subscription model they tried.  But one thing I will say for Bill Roper and the other founders - digging from their own pockets to pay an extra 30 days wages to folks they had to let go because the company is insolvent does not sound like "...looking for personal gain. Firing all of the Flagship employees in order to protect the personal interests of its founding members..." to me.  And if Hanbitsoft is such a squeaky-clean angel in all this, why don't they be more specific about exactly what onerous terms and conditions were attached with the money they supposedly generously offered Flagship that would have kept the doors open?

EA really promoted the potential of HG:L in other regions, so those companies who bought in had / have a lot riding on its success. Of course, HG:L and success aren't on speaking terms, so that's bad luck for the investors.

HG:L is only 8 months old. At this point it is more expensive to have bought a lifetime sub than to have paid monthly sub fees. For companies who have poured in a lot more money, been given a lot more assurances, I can understand why they'd be annoyed.

That HanbitSoft still wants the HG:L IP, and feels they have a right to it, is probably the more interesting thing.

It is suspicious that Hanbitsoft makes those accusations now. Maybe their contract to get the HG:L rights depended on something Flagship has countered by shutting the doors.

Of the two, I would think the Mythos IP would be more valuable currently. A lot of the beta testers like it way better than HG:L.

Because it's stupid to discuss contracts that are about to be come part of legal action?  Not that these press releases are the best course of action, either.

It is suspicious that Hanbitsoft makes those accusations now. Maybe their contract to get the HG:L rights depended on something Flagship has countered by shutting the doors.[/quote]

Yeah.. something like paying back the money they're owed.  From everything that has come out it looks like the following: Flagship put up the IP as Collateral for a loan from Hanbit.  By becoming insolvent/ closing the doors Flagship can't pay Hanbit back, so as the creditor they're going after the collateral to try and recoup the monetary loss.  Nothing shady there.

They spent a ton of money on marketing the HGL IP, with action figures, comic books, and even books. As far as the actual IP goes, it is clearly more valuable. As for the games themselves, HGL is a solid fun online platform. If it had a metric fuckton more content, it would rule.

http://hellgateguru.com/2008/07/official-forums-shutting-down/

You have approximately 11 hours to roast your marshmallows on the forums peeps. Get to it.

[edit] at time of writing that thread is up to 51 pages. Kind of sad tbh.

It's always sad to see a project end this way... lots of folks out looking for jobs now. 

I really can't help but think that this could have been avoided or at least delayed if they hadn't used that terrible subscription model.  They essentially made three different games:  Single player, Non-sub online and Sub online.  They all had different patch times and likely had different dev teams at work on them.  If that was streamlined into one non-sub online game they might have ramped down their team sizes at launch instead of ramping them up. 

I knew when buying HG:L that I wasn't going to buy into the subscription because I didn't feel it was worth it and I also had two subs for different games already.  What I didn't count on was how divisive it really made the game seem, when some people had special access and others (me) didn't.  Sure, I could have fixed it by subscribing.  But it wasn't worth it to me.  In the end, I just quit because I felt left out of the new content. 

Just one man's opinion.... but I'd suggest to other companies that this is *not* how to run a sub game.

I desperately wanted this game to succeed.....it's just sad....

They wanted MMO money without having to do MMO development.

Forums aren't closing today, per Tiggs:

http://forums.hellgatelondon.com/showpost.php?p=1152739&postcount=650

Damn.. Tiggs should have stayed at Turbine.

Amen, and that sort of thinking is spreading. WOTC is victim to that same thinking with it's poorly thought out DDI Online model.

I wonder how many people play solo with chat turned off.  I played that way a lot!  You have to think that since an awful lot of people don't bother with game forums, most of them will keep trying to log in after they turn off the juice.  Maybe they'll be able to log in but get a screen telling them that it's game over for good.  Won't they be surprised!  For some reason, the thought makes me giggle. 

I played it offline mostly, but I made an online (non sub) character recently so I can be around when the lights go out. And hopefully catch some of the drama.  :grin:

Flagshipped reports that the Mythos servers and forums are down (http://www.flagshipped.com/2008/07/19/bon-voyage-mythos-hellgate-is-now-only-a-fathom-away).

A shame. Mythos was a nice little bit of fun. Well, I'd never have played it once D3 came out anyway, so whatever...

I wonder how many people were blissfully unaware that the chat function even existed for the whole time they played.

Default to 'chat off' and no obvious way to turn it on, is a design decision right up there alongside 'pistol damage doesn't stack with rifle damage' in the pantheon of heroic stupidity.

In HG:L, at least, if you played online, the chat box was on.  It could fade out some times, but it was on.  It was always a race to see if I could type /channelleave X the 4 times required to leave the chat, trade, lfg, and newbie channels before getting any of the barrens-quality chat.  I played with friends online.  It actually did multiplayer way better than the Diablo games; felt more like a co-op game rather than a '3-4 people soloing near one another' game.

When the game launched, chat was hidden by default.  When you pulled it out, it didn't fade.

I think they thought it cluttered up the screen and made it harder to see bad guys, and well - with the big, clunky, ui they launched with - they were right.

Tiggs post:


Source (http://forums.hellgatelondon.com/showthread.php?p=1155209#post1155209)

Maybe SOE bought it to go with Vanguard!

... for at least another two weeks.

SOE would be the best thing that could happen to Hellgate London.

Amazingly enough - I agree.

I was just walking past this thread and a whole bunch of disembodied baby parts came shooting out, followed by the sound of a thousand mothers crying. I don't know what's going on, but you're all banned.

I'd third that, except for, well, the MMO-fee (which was the big no-buy point for me, along with the game being shite).

Woo hoo!

If this were true, maybe they'd actually support the single player bit.  I see no reason that the new areas and some of the other stuff shouldn't be in an SP patch.  FSS promised in the beginning that the SP would be attended to, but then, it doesn't matter what FSS said.  As we have known for sometime, FSS is crummy.

I predict it won't be SOE or NCSoft or any of the other 'known names.'  It will either be "hay we got a bunch of venture capital!" or "We're going to pull a Bowman, sell the game to ourselves to avoid our debits then run it ourselves using our personal fortunes and hope that the sub base is big enough we don't go into debit."

Reinstalling since it seems it's free now though I might be wrong.

It was always free, unless you paid for the teeny bit of extra content + 'hardcore' mode.

I don't know if you can get the sub stuff now without having had a subscription - which you can't do at the moment, anyway.  I know that they stopped charging and I still have the sub bits, Stonehenge and 2.0 on TC.  At least I did the last time I logged in which was a few days ago.  I only really play on the TC.

Oh, and yesterday this guy:

made this post:


I don't know who he is but Scapes posted after him so I guess he's legit.  Doesn't mean he's not talking rubbish, though.  I guess they must have a business plan since he's the business plan man.

Communication with their fanbase has always been a huge strongpoint with Hellgate.

In their defense, it's highly probably that they weren't aware that they had one.   

Ozuri was the 'business plan man' at Sigil Games as well, or something similar.

edit: that fact shouldn't condemn him alone, he seemed like a decent fellow during the beta!

The name did sound familiar but I was tired and couldn't be arsed to look it up.  Thank you for your attention to detail!   :heart:

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=19658 (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=19658)



edit to add:

T3 Entertainment recently acquired a controlling stake in HanbitSoft. (http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/40165)

I read about that the other day and just sort of dismissed it, mostly.  Didn't the owner of HanbitSoft sell 2/3 of it to T3 months ago and then retire.  I think it might just be new spin on an old story in light of the FSS news.  I wonder if they'll set up an office at all, or possibly just buy an old Fotomat booth and put a telephone and a girl in it.  Don't forget, FSS has denied that HanbitSoft owns their IPs.  It might even be a case for the courts, who knows?  Maybe saying they're opening a US office to do this stuff is just a way of trying to appear to own something that's still in dispute.   If T3 does find itself holding the rights to this stuff, it could be they'll just scavenge it for some other game.  I don't have much confidence that either game will make some dramatic, wonderful come back.

(http://www.netkitties.com/shirts/hang_in_there_baby.jpg)

A long interview with Bill Roper about HG:L, Flagship and what's currently going on. (http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=0&cId=3169356)

The "do more with less" is a very good lesson, as is "if you have to sell your IP to keep your studio open, don't be surprised when that turns around and bites you".

I see one very important group he isn't taking care of.... (That would be paying customers)

What would you expect them to do for the customers at this point?

They aren't paying any more.

These guys are going down swinging, facing the task of getting it all shut down. That's more than some have done.


Sadf.  :cry:

The company really was at steak!