Flagship Studios Sinking?
- Scribbled on June 11th, 2008 by Jonathon Howard
- Filed in Industry News, PC, RPG, Rumor Mill, WTF
Guy Somberg, Flagship Studio’s Audio and Gameplay programmer, wrote a revealing post on his blog, Plain Text, Monday June 9th. Guy lamented the fact that Flagship’s debut title, Hellgate: London, has not been the huge success they were hoping for. He confesses:
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.
Somberg also confesses that with the leaving of two interns in the next couple of months he will be the senior programmer at Flagship and the only one programming for Hellgate. As depressing as the post is Somberg remains hopeful that the game will be more successful in Korea and China.
Hellgate: London was released last fall for PC and was criticized soundly in the press for numerous bugs, slowdowns, crashes, user interface issues, bad art, and a host of other problems; you can read GameStooge’s savage review here.
Somberg, despite his depression, states that he enjoys working at Flagship and will be staying with the company, just that at times it’s hard when everyone you know is jumping ship. I hope for Guy’s sake that Flagship can turn itself around and deliver for its fans, both those of us who have enjoyed Hellgate: London and those waiting to see what new is coming out of the minds of the creators of Blizzard’s original Diablo.
(Thanks, GamaSutra.)
October 24th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
[...] all knew this moment was coming earlier this year when Flagship Studios closed their doors. Hellgate: London servers are shutting down forever on January 31, 2009. Namco Bandai, the [...]
November 4th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
[...] though Flagship Studios closed its doors, Digital Battle is reporting that an expansion to the maligned Hellgate: London is coming in Spring [...]