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Flagship Studios' Founder Discusses Its Demise
1Up is running a lengthy interview with Bill Roper, founder of Flagship Studios. The game company, known primarily for its Hellgate: London and Mythos titles, announced massive layoffs last month, and is now simply winding down and taking care of a few final issues. Roper gives quite a bit of detail regarding the financial machinations of a game developer and the current status of the games' code. Co-founders Max Schaefer and Travis Baldree gave a related interview recently as well.
"The subscription money we did get, we all poured directly into keeping the game online, keeping it up and running. But the development demands far outstripped the revenues. There just wasn't a good contemplation early on of how that would work. It wasn't like: This is the budget that comes in every month; we'll do whatever we can do with that. We just said [that] development will get done out of the revenues, and whoever pays for development, they get paid back out of the revenues. And there wasn't really enough revenues coming in to cover the expected and required development."
and you get a crappy return. From what I understand, there were a lot of bugs and problems with the game, to the point where it wasn't worth picking up. If those bugs had persisted, those already playing the game would have left (to varying degrees of course). In the end, they released a product that wasn't where it needed to be, and they lost out on their big opportunity to make a splash.
It's a shame when a studio that is at least trying something different goes under. It was a shame that Hellgate was basically a beta product until only recently. If you release a finished product at the start then you don't have to pay for developers from your monthly revenue.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
And this is why, ladies and gents, if you want to make a go of a business, you'd better understand the business end of things as well as the sales and product ends. And if you don't fully understand the business end, you hire someone who does.
And people wonder why VC firms are so obsessed about the cash flow of startups (after learning their lessons of the 90s).
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
So are we blaming it on piracy this time, or are we're going to be honest and say that Hellgate: London sucked balls?
The game had quite a good atmosphere and the quantity and quality of monsters and loot were very high. But with its repetitive combat and generic levels, this game was bound to be a bad selling one.
Maybe piracy did help a bit there, because people could see that it wasn't even worth it to buy a real copy, as to use it for the multiplayer part (which was shit too).
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
This happens in a lot of businesses where development plus operations costs are greater than the revenues generated. Without enough incoming cash to go around, the development effort fails. Without a good development effort, the revenue increases fail. It becomes a really nasty Catch-22.
It's actually similar to building a consulting business to the point that office and sales staff is necessary. It's very difficult to grow fast enough to pay the overhead.
In a lot of businesses, it's necessary to either be very small and lean, or huge enough that the overhead is minimal in proportion to "productive" and "billable" efforts.
Being in the middle is the most dangerous place of all.
News at Never o'clock.
http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc/hellgatelondon
Pretty much all the reviews point out that while it's a nice enough game, it's competitors are similar if not better, are cheaper, and were already out there. Hellgate was well polished but dull is what it sounds like, and there were better products out there.
There was no money coming in because your product wasn't competitive.
While I hate to see people lose their jobs, and sincerely hope all the people who created the game get hired again quickly at studios with better guidance, it's somewhat of a relief to me that creative financial management couldn't be used to make a bad game into a success. There are a glut of games on the wii especially but consoles in general that aren't worth a dime because they're bankrupt in the innovation and creativity department. It would be nice if those games weren't made.
I personally prefer games that aren't as polished graphically but have great concepts. They're more fun to play as well as being cheaper. It's nice when they're both, but the old adage about a horse built by comittee is a camel rings true. A small group of individuals can often come up with a better, riskier idea for a game than you'll get coming out of a big studio, at the small price of not having overdone graphics.
Here's to hoping that EA will suffer the same fate.
My understanding is that Mythos was free to play... Maybe developing a free game at the same time as you're trying to develop a for-profit game was an issue. It seems like you'd want to spend your money making the profitable game and then make freebies once you've got a revenue stream going that covers your costs...
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
From my impression, these guys had potential to make a great game. But what happened is what never happens to Blizzard. Apparently they had to release the game before it was done.
This means they fell for the trap that is affecting a huge amount of software devs and software companies out there. The MS effect. Make a product that "promises" to be bigger and better than the competition, and then lose your ability to create a simple product that is codeable in a short amount of time... and turns into unpolished bloatware. That kind of software is always crap to everybody but the bleeding edge types or the devs themselves. From their perspective, it's an inch away from being perfect. In reality, it's never going to be right.
- We're pretty good at making games, but don't really know dick about running a company
- Turns out there were some other people there at Blizzard that knew what they were doing, and we didn't know how good they were until we didn't have them
- WoW and it's 11 million subscribers means you have to really bring something special to the table if you expect to get any of the scraps left over, and we didn't do that
Go back to Blizzard, Bill. I'm sure they could use someone to help get Warcraft 4 off the ground.
So is this the Ion Storm of the 2000s?
It's a Diablo clone set in a post apocalyptic future. It's hardly innovative.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I had high hopes from the 'Diablo' team. They over-reached, and tried to introduce a crappy subscription system that no one wanted. Add to that the repetitive nature of the game and the EXTREMELY boring environments. They should have made a decent single player game, no subscription, end of story. They got greedy looking at Blizz and saying "oooo me too me too"
Good-bye
This is too bad. I really enjoyed Hellgate: London.
But I suppose any game that has its own "Spinning Wheel of Death" issues is bound to fail. I have a couple of friends who wanted to play but were never able to connect. And at the time (around May of this year) there were hundreds if not thousands of threads on the forums from people with the same problems and never made it past the spinning wheel on multiplayer.
Reading the posts, you'd say that each and every one is a successful business[man|woman].
Well, guess what, until you try to develop a commercial product, you won't know how tricky it is, especially subscription-based.
For version-based products that ship in a box or are downloaded, you invest some money (yours or loaned), work and release Version 1.0. If it's successful enough (e.g. you get some profit), you gather feedback and use some of the profit to make version 2.
With subscription-based services, you need to guess: how many potential subscribers? what's the optimal fee to maximize profit? How many will cancel after one month?
In the end, as much as we hate to say it, luck plays a major role. There are so many products out there and one a few "sell by themselves" to to brand recognition (WoW, anything LoTR or Star Wars/Trek).
PROFIT!
I bought the HG:L CE + lifetime subscription.
I could never really get into the game though. Part of it was that I was busy with other stuff at the time, but part of it was just that the game didn't really draw me in like other games have.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
I so hope they release a patch so people can play multi-player with out them. Or even a stand alone server.
Not that I expect to play that much as I lost interest around level 20. Personally, they made the game require to much hardware for most my friends to buy it, and not being able to play LAN makes it less fun.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
I rather liked the gameplay of Hellgate (minus the bugs, of course), but the lack of content really killed it.
It was *that* close to being a great game. It just didn't cut it and I'm back to D2.
Wasn't there a story a few months back where some Flagship nutjob, well I can call him that now since he was crazy obviously, claimed they were doing just fine? And that they had no problems what so ever. I knew it was corporate spin back then, but it seems delicious now.
Really, you can have some of the best designers or game writers in the industry, but if you ship products (let alone your flagship product) with significant game play issues and bugs, well guess what...you probably will not recover from the bad publicity, even if your next products are better.
These guys have a lot of talent, I just wish they could have planned things better.
Ave Molech Setting
...really.
Playing Hellgate in Hardcore Elite mode (one life - when you're dead, you're dead. Lose all your stuff and start again) is one of the most intense gaming experiences you will ever have.
If you've never felt your heart pounding in your chest *before you've even seen the boss monster*. Or had your hands shaking and your palms are sweating after a particularly intense battle, you haven't really played it. I've walked away from the computer and been *scared* to continue playing...
The repetetive tilesets, shallow quests and daft NPC's don't matter a toss at the end of the day. When you stand to lose *weeks* of levelling a character through one silly mistake, you're going to play as though your life depends on it...
It's impossible to explain to someone that's never played hardcore, but HG:L is at the top of it's class for full-on, in-your-face, adrenalin-pumping, non-stop 3D demon-slaying.
Here's a short video made by one of our guild members: Burn in Hell. There are a couple of other vids on that page too.
It's a damn shame that such a great game just didn't make it, but I'll be playing until I see "server not found" when I try to log in...
Well, actually it's even funnier than that.
1. As the summary says, they were counting on lots of monthly subscriptions to keep development going. It was pretty much the MMO model, but...
2. in a game which, honestly, did't offer much reason to fork over cash monthly.
And I say that as a guy who's currently paying 3 subscriptions to 3 different MMOs. I don't have a problem with paying monthly, in a game where I feel I'm getting the content or gaming experience worth that money. Hellgate just offered no good reason. Pay just so I can play a shoot-em-up online? Why? To it,
A) they promised extra content for the people who subscribe. That content evolved from being literally non-existent to being ridiculously little.
B) usually the motivation for going online is to play with other people. But the vicious circle was that their subscription had kept most people from even trying it online. (And again, the subscriber content that might have defused it, was just not there.)
C) the bugs also didn't help. There was a limited player base to start with, and the subscription culled off most of those.
So it's not as much just the bugs, as such. For a SP game, it wasn't too horrible. It was just mediocre.
It's that they based their whole model on getting a money money-printing license, like WoW or Everquest back in the day. But they apparently thought it would just happen by itself.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
playing Hellgate as a single player. I picked up a sniper and went to town with that guy. It was like a cross between Doom and Diablo for me and I really enjoyed that.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
seriously, it's like you've never even played this game. Did your friend let you play on his computer for 10 minutes at least?
Remember when this story first broke how he and the management at Flagship said that the stories of their demise was bullshit? Now we know he was lying through his teeth.
When I first read about Hellgate London, I saw the teaser trailers which had an interesting, dark, backs to the wall kind of story, and plenty of bad-ass sexy CGI girls shooting stuff.
The game, when I saw the youtube in-game shots, was just another shoot-em up, with nothing like the gritty details of the pre-rendered videos.
I don't know how many games I've seen that do this; use some trick to capture people's attention, but present nothing in the real game itself.
I contrast this with UT3, which, while having really good graphics, makes no pretences about being anything else than a shoot-em up, or with WoW (which I've never played) which has an open ended player controlled story, or with games like Warhammer, which has a massive background (if somewhat juvenile) backstory.
Hellgate: London sucked and therefore they didn't make any money.
First off, remember pre-release how they were droning on about how they were going to be better than WoW... AND be free? Obviously, they didn't bother having anyone with knowledge of accounting (or personal finance) review their dot-bomb era, "money is irrelevant" business plan.
Second, as has been mentioned, the game was complete crap. I unfortunately tried it out, and instantly regretted it. The game system was overly and needlessly complex. One of my biggest complaints was the incredible amount of "Inventory Tetris" you are forced to do. It's amazing, there is really NO way around it. And honestly, that's the least of the games problems.
Good riddance, I say. While it would be nice to maybe see it go open source, that hasn't ever helped a game out. I can name on no hands all the great open source games out there. It seems most commercial to open source projects are cases of "our code sucks and our business is a miserable failure... so maybe this open source buzzword can save us!!", much like Netscape.
Just sell the source code for $100 a pop, and license the artwork to amatuer programmers by having them pay you $5-10 per copy sold that uses that code or art from the game. At least you'll recoup some of your losses.