Flagship Not Closed Yet?

Posted 16th Jul 2008 02:23 PM by Flux

Word from Flagship Studios is that they remain afloat. They concede that most employees were laid off, but say they still retain the rights to HGL and Mythos, and that the core founding group remains intact. It’s unclear if they cut a deal with their foreign creditors or are holding them off with legal maneuvers, or how so few employees can support their ongoing projects, but the dream lives on. The full statement:

San Francisco, CA (July 14, 2008)—Flagship Studios has announced today that despite rumors to the contrary, the company is still operating.

“It is with deep regret that I must announce that Flagship Studios has laid off most employees. However, the core management and founding team members are still at Flagship.” said Bill Roper, CEO of Flagship Studios. “The past five years have been an incredible experience for us, but unfortunately, we couldn’t sustain the size of the company any longer.”

Flagship Studios owns the rights to all its technology and IP, including Hellgate: London and Mythos. Due to the current situation, Flagship will not be taking any new subscribers for Hellgate: London, and all current subscriptions will not be billed.

Flagship wishes to extend their heartfelt thanks to those that have supported the company and games over the past five years.




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SCFreelancer
Posted 16, Jul 2008 03:49 PM
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Strange press release: they are still operational, but they’re no longer accepting subscriptions? I wonder what they are planning to do now…

It would be interesting if, lets say in a few months, they would release all currently available content for everyone in a buyable package that can also be played solo offline… Things like LAN support are probably still out of the question, but I would give it probably give it a try if they would do so.

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RyTEK
Posted 16, Jul 2008 04:12 PM
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I am a bit confused about this news… I was under the belief that HGL just ticked it’s 1,000,000th subscriber.  At $9.99 a month, they are receiving about $10million/month - and that doesn’t even count the original software sale at $50.  Did they just mismanage their money?  They should have plenty of incoming assets to float a few employees and their stateside/worldwide servers.

As a player of this game, I would be willing to pay a 1 time fee to catch up to all of the subscriber content (patch 2.0, etc) to have this be a complete game that I can fire up any time.

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Flux
Posted 16, Jul 2008 05:21 PM
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i think that means they’ve had 1m subscribers total. Not concurrent.  Probably the vast majority of those were the first month or 2, and have since quit.  and they had vast overhead with so many employees, 5 years dev time, loans due to publishing partners, promotional expenses, etc.

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XMaulX
Posted 16, Jul 2008 06:21 PM
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Hope they wake up and make as SCFreelancer said, make a decent SP and add lan support and this game will be a lot more popular.
Some decent way to do a single player muling (like A.T.M.A. was for D2) and I’d even buy this game for my friends, but as it is, I couldn’t play past act 3… :p

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Shallie
Posted 16, Jul 2008 08:05 PM
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That’ really weird. I wonder what those guys are doing, focus on Mythos and hope that it will be a bigger success than HGL to get some money or work on a closing version for HGL?

About the subscriptions. Usually the numbers you read/hear about are the total accounts that have been created. That doesn’t mean that all those are active.

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SCFreelancer
Posted 16, Jul 2008 08:38 PM
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From what I read the whole Mythos team has been laid off. To quote Travis Baldree, Project Lead and Programmer on Mythos:

"Well, it’s an interesting few days here for all of us. It’s just been killing me not to post until now, but I really needed to wait until some things were settled and announced. As you may or may not know Flagship Studios laid off almost all employees effective friday - you should be able to see the press release in the Announcements. Now, on the face of it, that really does sound like the end of Mythos as we know it - but we have a tight-knit team that feels like family and hopes to stick together. Unfortunately, I can’t speak at any real length about our immediate plans just yet - but let’s say that we hope to have you back up and Beta testing for us in one way or another sometime soon."

Sad, very sad. I do wonder what the future plans are going to be.

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Fleshpeeler
Posted 16, Jul 2008 11:48 PM
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I wasn’t surprised when i heard this. My friend and I had been victims of the hype around the game for over a year. When it came out we were both severely disappointed. The graphics were decent but the gameplay was mediocre and the tilesets horribly overused. They used the excuse "all the levels are random!" but it was more of the same stuff every level.I still can’t believe i wasted time getting to act 4 just to have the same damn street and subway tileset that i was running around in, in the first levels of act 1.
I feel for the company, that sucks, but i personally am pissed that they made people cough up sixty bucks for that hunk of crap that still needs years more work. I also think it’s great that they arent working on diablo3, if it turned out anything like hellgate it would have been blizzards gigantic failure. Im sorry for the rant, but I for one was very disappointed with hellgate and still can’t believe how bad it was after such high expectations and hype.

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DeusEx
Posted 17, Jul 2008 12:02 AM
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you do realize that its not flagships fault. EA is what pushed the game to be released when it was not even ready. thats why they rushed into the alpha/beta and failed. i wouldnt talk down on the masterminds behind the diablo series

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Fleshpeeler
Posted 17, Jul 2008 12:17 AM
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I should’ve figured EA was behind it all. Well if that’s the case then i take back all the bashing directed at the team. I guess that makes a lot of sense though that everything happened the way it did because the team is used to having a game "done when it’s done" not when EA says it’s done.

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Tman
Posted 17, Jul 2008 01:33 AM
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This is an attempt to save Mythos, really this is their last chance. About two months ago Guy Somburg a dev there vented on his personal blog. Basically it was about him being the only dev left working on HG:L and the rest of the management and FSS founders working predominantly on Mythos and this was their new focus. When it was found that the blog became news he pulled it.
So there ya have it they sacrificed everyone working on HG:L as its no longer a priority. I don’t think it has anything to do with going bankrupt, but more what is a change in focus to "casual gaming".
Still I feel somewhat upset by this as there were allot of founders and subs that gave these guys allot of money, but didn’t get much in return.

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