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."

Comments

Re:release a crappy product

[OrangeTide]

Even with the bugs it was quite playable I found. The missing content was the annoying part to it, but you couldn't really find out about that until you bought it.

Initial release quality is important if you want to have an impact with game review magazines. Not everyone bases their buy decision off these magazines, but I think enough do for it to really hurt a game if they get a couple bad reviews. Especially in the PC game market where there are so many new games released every year, and where gamers are generally more literate (sorry xbox gamers, but it's true).