Flagship Sunk?

[Aez]

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

Hum, they had 2 : HG and Mythos.

[lesion]

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

Taylor Balbi confirmed the closure folks: http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/39...d-All-I-P-Lost

Well, Andrew I don't want to tell you how to do your job at VE3D, but normally you check the quotes before making them appear as fact. I didn't say this at all, and I have never spoken to you or recall ever speaking to you about anything ever. I'm sorry, but this news article is just not from me.

[sam, an eggplant]

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

[Miasma]

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

[lesion]

They've gone to plaid.

[Signe]

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

[IainC]

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

Taylor Balbi confirmed the closure folks: http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/39...d-All-I-P-Lost

Well, Andrew I don't want to tell you how to do your job at VE3D, but normally you check the quotes before making them appear as fact. I didn't say this at all, and I have never spoken to you or recall ever speaking to you about anything ever. I'm sorry, but this news article is just not from me.

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

[Signe]

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.   

[Falwell]

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.

[Signe]

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

[schild]

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

[Signe]

Why?

[eldaec]

Why?

Makes people who have to live Arizona jealous I imagine.

[Tige]

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.

[schild]

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

[Musashi]

I think the lesson here is simple.

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

[Ratman_tf]

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. 

But yeah. Making games is hard and whatnot.

[sam, an eggplant]

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.

[Samprimary]

All staff fired. All IP lost. End of the road.

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.

[eldaec]

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

[Samprimary]

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!

[lesion]

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

[Samprimary]

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

[lesion]

[Ratman_tf]

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.

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? 

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

[Strazos]

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

[sam, an eggplant]

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.

[WindupAtheist]

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.

[mutantmagnet]

 

[Fabricated]

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.

[Ragnoros]

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.

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.

[Yegolev]

Next time, no skill trees.

[rk47]

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

[UnSub]

It's worthwhile to link this rant by Somberg. Flagship had been leaking people for a while.

So why is work depressing? (Other than all of those other depressing things, that is.) The reason is that people are leaving. In droves, they’re leaving. We’ve had programmers, accountants, HR people, and artists leave. The founders are all still around, but they’ve been floating away from Hellgate to work on various other projects. The only one still actively on Hellgate is Tyler, but Tyler’s not programming anymore; he spends all of his time on management activities.

[Sir T]

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