Flagship Studios confirms layoffs, extent unknown
by Alexander Sliwinski 
{ Jul 11th 2008 at 5:25PM }
The news isn't exactly surprising following a Flagship programmer's blog post a couple months ago that employees were leaving the company "in droves." Gamasutra has confirmed there have been "significant staff cuts" at the studio, but there's no official word on the extent of the layoffs.
[Via GameDaily]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Joseph @ Jul 11th 2008 6:30PM
You know, rate me down if you want, but I was really hoping Flagship Studios would learn from the mistake that was HGL and produce something really stellar. I have faith in a lot of the people who founding Flagship, I really hope this isn't the end.
troyadam @ Jul 11th 2008 8:41PM
These guys created Diablo. They deserve our respect.
target_render @ Jul 11th 2008 9:54PM
the game was crap. I feel bad for all the people that worked on it though. Hopefully they'll be all right/
Mythor @ Jul 12th 2008 12:03AM
Mythos is being developed by "Flagship Seattle". I'm not sure any lay offs would necessarily affect them.
Still, I guess that means HGL is virtually done for now. Shame. :(
zuburi @ Jul 12th 2008 12:14AM
I kinda dug Hellgate. The pay model was terrible, though. I feel only slightly bad for the people that paid for the "founding" membership.
NewJohnny @ Jul 12th 2008 3:17PM
Just because they worked on Diablo doesn't mean they collectively know anything about game production. Would you hire the guy working on the Honda assembly line to build you a car?
G-Anderton @ Jul 13th 2008 3:44AM
That's a bit different, a person who can put a car together is not the man that designed the car. The people they are referring to are the people who wrote the code for diablo, meaning they have deep insights on how the game was built... Unlike an assembly line worker.
NewJohnny @ Jul 13th 2008 3:13PM
Ok, bad analogy, but my point is valid. It takes a lot more than good code to make a popular game. There were a lot of people involved in the decision making process at Blizzard, and you can see it in their track-record of good games.
t_m @ Jul 12th 2008 1:21AM
Hellgate: London seemed like such an awesome idea for a game.
But they cut their own legs out from under themselves with their insane procing model. I guess they had no choice but to release it early, but if they'd finished it, and released it with a sensible pricing system, it could have been really big... sigh...
mocax @ Jul 12th 2008 1:49AM
Looks like they got flagshipped.
Faar @ Jul 12th 2008 2:49AM
This sucks of course for the regular working people who's getting fired, but right now I'm like, fsck Flagship and the horse it rode in on for making Hellgate a pay-to-play game.
Hopefully, in case they really do go bust, it will be a a valuable lesson for any other companies out there thinking of gouging their customers for extra money each month; I'm sure there's a few thinking in that direction.
Maybe they'll learn that while subscriptions may earn you a couple bucks here and now, in the long run it'll come around and bite you in the ass. Because gamers do not forgive betrayal easily. ...Errr...or something. :)