Flagship Studios' entire staff fired, all intellectual property lost

by Griffin McElroy { Jul 12th 2008 at 8:30PM }

A bit of clarification recently surfaced regarding the closure of Hellgate: London and Mythos developer Flagship Studios -- though we'd heard from an unnamed source that Flagship would be shutting its doors and letting go of "nearly everyone" on the payroll, Flagship community manager Taylor Balbi recently explained that the entire staff has been fired with a 30-day pension, paid for out of the pockets of the studio's higher-ups.

The studio's intellectual property has been turned over to two companies who had invested in Flagship throughout its short lifespan, with Mythos going to Korean gaming developer HanbitSoft, and Hellgate: London going to Comerica, a financial services company based out of Dallas. It's expected these two companies will work together to continue Asian development for these two titles -- though it's unclear whether the uber-charming Mythos will ever hit North American shores.

Tags: closure, comerica, flagship, flagship-studios, hanbitsoft, hellgate-london, intellectual-property, ip, mythos

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

BigKountry @ Jul 12th 2008 8:37PM

HOLY ****BALLZ!!!!

Wubbytoes @ Jul 12th 2008 8:42PM

That pretty sad, hopefully all those guys get other jobs in the industry soon.

äsdf @ Jul 12th 2008 9:32PM

Ideally, I would like to see these guys get reabsorbed into Blizzard now that Diablo III is public knowledge ;3

tmacairjordan87 @ Jul 12th 2008 10:04PM

Their Diablo clone was an absolute failure and an abomination of a game, why should blizzard take them in? Not saying it to be mean, because it's true, I'm just saying why should blizzard do that?

I do hope they find jobs somewhere in the industry though.

äsdf @ Jul 12th 2008 10:21PM

We've seen what they can do with the luxury of money and time under the Blizzard name. They don't need to prove anything else to me. HG:L was probably released in the state it was simply because they had no choice.

Oneiromancer @ Jul 12th 2008 10:24PM

Hellgate London was pretty abysmal, yes, but their *true* Diablo clone, Mythos, was very good, and I bet more people are sad to see that go than Hellgate, even though it wasn't out of beta yet.

bobartig @ Jul 13th 2008 1:50AM

The Flagship crew are in San Francisco, which has a tremendous game development community. I'm sure they'll find work. Depending on the economy and other factors, they might not be able to demand the same salaries they're used to, but there's plenty of work to be had here.

BananaBoat @ Jul 12th 2008 8:46PM

I can't say I'm surprised. A new studio, with a massive flop on the books first thing...doesn't scream longevity. If only hellgate london had been good =/

Noshino @ Jul 12th 2008 8:51PM

Yah, your first title is always important, and although I really thought the concept was great, but the fact that every patch for Hellgate instead of fixing things created more problems didn't help....

Anyway, Mythos also has/had a great concept, thing is, if Im not wrong, it still in beta, hopefully HanbitSoft takes the development of the way on the right direction

LordKelvin @ Jul 12th 2008 9:12PM

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/5/11/

ParadeRainer @ Jul 12th 2008 8:46PM

Lesson to be learned: if you make a rehashed and boring game, hype it up to be the next Diablo (and fall way short), AND charge your customers for an underdeveloped and bland multiplayer component... no one is going to cry for you when you get sunk. Good riddance, I almost spent 50$ on this game. Silicon Knights is next.

I guess innovation still counts for something. Oh wait.

The_Punisher @ Jul 12th 2008 8:57PM

Innovation counts when the devopers do it right.

Metal Gear Series FTW!

Noshino @ Jul 12th 2008 10:07PM

you should click that Source link, it helps, really

J.Goodwin @ Jul 12th 2008 8:59PM

Yikes.

Metal Gear, innovative? WTF?

tmacairjordan87 @ Jul 12th 2008 10:06PM

Yeah the original Metal Gear and Metal Gear Solid were the first of their kind and the first of their kind to do stealth right (for the time they came out)

LaughingTarget @ Jul 12th 2008 11:08PM

Metal Gear, yes, but when Thief showed up, Solid had a hard time justifying taking the MSX2 experience and sticking it in 3D.

Neebs @ Jul 12th 2008 9:12PM

Opening with an MMO is just foolish.
Super expensive to produce, then to maintain, that isn't guaranteed to last? No.

mezzanine @ Jul 12th 2008 9:22PM

BAHBAHBAHWHUUUUUUUUU?

Hellgate wasn't THAT bad.

igloo15 @ Jul 12th 2008 9:27PM

Taylor Balbi has refuted those statements on the Hellgate forums. According to him there is still a number of people working at Flagship. Also representatives of Flagship have said they have not lost Hellgate IP and warned that lawyers would be involved if anyone claimed otherwise.

Mythor @ Jul 12th 2008 9:56PM

Actually, all he's said is that he didn't say what VE3D are saying he said. He's not denying that the gist of it is true at all.

CTC XBL-supapaypamawio PSN-ctclaw @ Jul 12th 2008 9:30PM

I'm sure Infinity Ward is hiring:)

juju187 @ Jul 12th 2008 9:37PM

not for them...

Sora @ Jul 12th 2008 11:33PM

I don't see Infinity Ward asking them, but maybe it could go like this:

Flagship:

Infinity Ward doesn't want you guys. Though, Treyarch will need all the help they can get...Go ask them for a job.

-Infinity Ward

äsdf @ Jul 13th 2008 12:50AM

Right, modern day LucasArts is clearly more qualified to work at a company than the developers of Diablo.

People need to learn a little respect these days. If anything, Flagship are overqualified to work at Infinity Ward. Not that I would really want them there anyways because all IW makes is generic shooty shooty bang bang.

juju187 @ Jul 13th 2008 11:19AM

whats the difference from generic FPS diablo?

aristokrat @ Jul 13th 2008 11:45AM

I'm sure there are plenty of capable programmers coming from Flagship that IW would love to get their hands on. I'm sure that not everyone from the other studios they posted those messages about got jobs. It wasn't just "hey come on in, we'll fit everyone in somewhere." IW just uses the opportunity to get a crack at the best from these studios.

äsdf @ Jul 12th 2008 9:32PM

Flagship:

Infinity Ward is hiring.

jobs@infinityward.com

Rogue5 @ Jul 12th 2008 10:03PM

Creating a MMO as your first title, took alot of effort, time and money to do. With average gameplay and so so reviews also didn't help them. I hoping they can regroup with Mythos, but i guess thats not going to happen.

F1 @ Jul 12th 2008 10:21PM

And so it ends... So how bout that warcraft.

Deckard @ Jul 12th 2008 10:31PM

Yay, I'm so glad I signed up for the Mythos beta now.

Nick the Hero of Canton @ Jul 12th 2008 10:45PM

COD4 Message of the Day in 3...2....

niindre @ Jul 12th 2008 10:51PM

Wow. I guess if you make one utterly shitty game, that's it.

I still don't know how these guys originally did Diablo1... crazy.

Joseph @ Jul 12th 2008 11:01PM

They also did Diablo II, parts of Warcraft 2 and 3, not to mention wrote practically all of the Blizzard in-house code for the 1990's. It just goes to show that time and money IS required to produce a really good product. Flagship had neither going into making Hellgate London.

dark_inchworm @ Jul 13th 2008 12:58AM

Interesting fact: Warcraft II was developed in 11 months.

(Got no source for it, my apologies, but I remember reading it time and time again)

Rollins @ Jul 12th 2008 10:54PM

This really, really sucks.

I'm in the Mythos closed beta and have been for some time - it's a great and enjoyable game, even as it stands right now. It's truly everything Hellgate failed to be; it channels Diablo's core gameplay but simultaneously does its own thing.

I have no confidence in any development team's ability to finish Mythos other than the current one, especially a Korean one. Where Flagship had some pretty good ideas on how to implement a cash shop of sorts, a Korean dev team would just implement a standard one and turn Mythos into a grindfest.

I'm going to go sob in a corner now.

mocax @ Jul 12th 2008 11:52PM

No matter how many hits you make, just one ubercowudder is enough to discredit your entire portfolio.

Rollins @ Jul 13th 2008 12:07AM

Diablo 2 has quite a few uber cow udders.

crsh @ Jul 13th 2008 12:17AM

I was one of those direly disappointed HG:L players, but it's sad news to hear they got shut down completely.

ianp711 @ Jul 13th 2008 1:05AM

Although sad to see this happen, I think it's payback to the -tards-, which are the executives, to pay out of pocket the 30-day pension for their decision to push the monthly fee so you can get the actual full game.

Personally, I posted very negatively about this game for that reason. I believe that the monthly fee was the main reason why the hardcore gamer crowd stayed away along with the games buggy unfished state.

MASSIVELY IDIOTIC EXECS FTL!

Shaq-Fu @ Jul 13th 2008 2:54AM

NOOOO MYTHOS!!!! I was looking forward to feeling smug that I didn't have to pay for my addiction unlike WoW geeks. Now the only chance of an MMO is pretty much a possible Animal Crossing or some other console MMO. Unless, some really good free ones start popping up

Word Up, North Korea! @ Jul 13th 2008 3:07AM

hellgate london would have been a decent game if 1) all the levels didn't look pretty much identical & 2) all the missions weren't pretty much the same 3 types

i desperately wanted to like the game, but it was just blah

zeldazeppelin @ Jul 13th 2008 3:17AM

its sad yes. But never played the game hg:l sorry.
but at least you can play guild wars it owns and its free online play

albinogoldfish @ Jul 13th 2008 4:00AM

damn, no mercy on the chopping block...

t_m @ Jul 13th 2008 8:52AM

From what I heard Hellgate:London was actually a pretty good game underneath. It was definitely a nice idea, and a lot more ambitious than (for example) Diablo3.

Like a lot of new studios they bit off more than they could chew, and so they ran out of cash and had to release it early and unfinished. Also, they made VERY dumb decisions about the fee structure.. but maybe that was beacuse they were in so much debt.

Shame really, with a bit more time, a bit more cash, and a bit of common sense with the fees - it could have been great...

Rabidkeebler @ Jul 13th 2008 9:37AM

It was a great game...in theory. But they really shot themselves in the foot with pay service. If that had not existed, I can't help but feel that the game would have done better overall. I do feel bad about this though. Hope they get good jobs some place else.

Ogapo @ Jul 13th 2008 3:26PM

Hope the devs are able to get hired somewhere else.

popozao @ Jul 14th 2008 3:19AM

Does this company run in some sort of hyper-accelerated space-time-continuum? I could have sworn that a week ago they were hopeful for the future of Mythos and taking time to polish it, and now like 20 min. later everyone is fired and/or dead with said companies having to file for every chapter of bankruptcy available! Well, bit of exaggeration, but still! WTF!! ITS BEEN 1 WEEK!!!!!!