Anatomy of a disaster: Flagship Studios founder speaks

Flagship Studios' founder Bill Roper recently spoke with 1Up about how the Hellgate London developer ended up becoming another cautionary tale for young developers out there. Roper explains that the revenue model on Hellgate was broken and much of the money coming in went into keeping the game online, instead of expanding content like it should have.

Roper also admits the quality of the title wasn't great. He blames the PC market for being "lousy last year" and concedes Flagship didn't have unlimited money to hold on to Hellgate any longer. He also confesses that the company overreached trying to make "an MMO and an RPG and a shooter," attempting to please everyone and (obviously) satisfying very few at the end. Roper explains the Flagship Studios disaster in 1Up's interview in detail -- definitely worth a read for any aspiring studio head.

Reader Comments (17)

At least the man is humble enough to admit mistakes. I had high hopes for Hellgate but found too many issues with it when the title came out. It just wasn't polished enough and the whole "kind of a RPG, kind of a FPS" gameplay didn't suite me. Maybe I was expecting too much since the studio was made up of former Blizzard employees.

The only comment that I take excepting to is that the PC marker was "lousy" last year. Last year was a great year for games, for all platforms really. PC was no different.

I must be the only guy on earth that likes that game as much as I see everyone badmouthing it.

The one and only gripe I had with the game (and still do) is they took out LAN play in an attempt to siphon money.

Serves them right.

"PC market was lousy last year"?

What exactly does he mean? That there were so many awesome titles coming out that nobody wanted to buy his crappy game?

I'm just as confused as you are. Why is it whenever a console game flops, everyone pretty much concurs that it was either shitty game design or poor marketing, but when it's a PC title it's because the PC market is "lousy" or "dead" or due to "teh pirates!"

Yet you never hear Blizzard, Valve, Gearbox, etc. complain about the so-called "dying" PC market...

I must be the only guy on earth that likes this game, especially since I see everyone badmouthing it.

My one and only gripe I had with this game (and still do) is the removal of LAN play in an attempt to siphon money.

Serves them right.

Darn it sorry for double post...refresh was lagging.

That's some sad stuff right there.

Oh Bill.

I will always love you for Diablo 2, no matter how disappointing Hellgate was.

I ended up in the beta for this game, and played it right up until release. The concept of the game was very nice, it was quite enjoyable. However, it was just so damned buggy. Also, it seemed like the characters talked a lot but didn't say anything,in a manner of speaking. Another six months in production, and I think they could have avoided this whole situation and had a halfway decent game on their hands.

Yeah, the bugs are what ended up killing my desire to play the game. The game kept hard-freezing on my PC. I was able to run STALKER with barely any trouble (only the occasional crash after a long play session) and yet Hellgate seemed to give my rig a heart attack. How does that work?

If by the PC market being "lousy last year" is in any way a reference to WoW crushing any hope for competition...then yes, it sure was lousy. I feel sorry for their inability to compete with a game that maintains an iron grip on the MMORPG community for a justified revenue model.

GG.

Bill, here's some other great PC games which came out in 2007 to dispute your claim: Orange Box, Bioshock, Unreal 2007, Crysis, COD4.

Sorry Bill, the PC market was not lousy last year. For triple-A single player games, in comparison to the console market for the same, sure - but not the MMO market. Your game and your company failed because of repeated missteps and lousy management. Hellgate is infamous for its lack of direction and design among members of communities for other MMOs and garnered lousy reviews last year.

Please reflect hard on Hellgate's failure and your own part in it before ever considering designing games again.

"i would of spent less time with the 17 languages"
i mean really why would you support so many languages from the get go, i thought thing like that were outsourced?

Pretty fascinating interview, you really feel for the guy. He

So is he going to go back to Blizzard?

It was the revenue model that killed it.

It wasn't finished, and it was buggy... but the basic game was sound, and the idea was nice. And its not like we haven't had thousands of other games that were buggy at launch.

But with that revenue model it was fighting an uphill battle from before its launch... and needed to be perfect out the gate.

Anatomy of a disaster: Flagship Studios founder speaks

Reader Comments (17)

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