Zack “Ozuri” Karlsson, Senior Director of Business Development at Namco Bandai Games America posted the following announcement on the official forum regarding upcoming support for Hellgate: London and a bail for Flagship Studios from its current predicament.
Hello Hellgaters,
I know everyone is looking for an announcement, and we’d love to make one — but right now, many things are in flux and we don’t have all the information yet. As soon as we do, we’ll post here on the forums, on the website, and anywhere else we can find you.
In the short term, please do not worry. The game is up, the servers are not going away in the short term and any major changes to status will be communicated in advance.
I’d like to ask for your patience as we try to figure it all out and chart a new course. We value your community, your commitment, and your passion for Hellgate and we will make sure that any solution that we architect will support all of you as best as we are able.
Thanks again. We hope to have a real announcement shortly.
Just before the official Mythos forums went offline, Max Schaefer posted a personal thank you to all the fans and players of Mythos:
They say it’s not so much the destination as it is the journey that’s important. We’re really hoping that’s the case around here these days. I can’t really believe I’m writing a post like this, but here we are faced with the unpleasant task of taking a hiatus from this crazy project. Unlike most games, Mythos has been running with our testing community for almost its whole life. I really feel like we’ve all done this together. And despite this bump in the road, I think we’ve succeeded wildly. This is undoubtedly the best game community I’ve ever seen. This is the best game development team in the world, in both Seattle and San Francisco. The things we’ve learned here, and with you all, will be with us forever.
PC gaming is changing, and I believe we’ve had a sneak preview with Mythos. With any luck, this will not be a long hiatus, and Mythos will be back. But even if it’s not, and even if we all move on, we’ve taken a lot of important steps forward. Game development is in many ways a continuum, and we all build on what came before. I know neither Travis, the great Mythos dev team, nor myself are planning on doing anything but make games into the future. So no matter what, we’ll pick up where we left off and you’ll be hearing from us shortly. We may not be the best business people on the planet , but we know how to make games. And once the dust settles here, that’s what we hope to get right back to doing as soon as possible. So until then, aux revoir Mythos community! It’s truly been a privilege to have experienced this with you.
Diane “Tiggs” Migliaccio contacted me with the following news on behalf of Flagship Studios with regards to Mythos.
Travelers of Uld,
We, the ancient elders of Uld are issuing this warning to all citizens and travelers. Hurry! The great darkness that once plagued Uld is returning. Everyone is ordered to close down their shops and prepare. We predict the when night is at its peak the darkness will arrive. The ancient elders of Uld will be leaving immediately in order to preserve the lore of this wonderful world. Citizens please prepare thyself and know that the elders will be back from their travels some day.
From the team:
We regretfully announce that on Friday, July 18, 2008 at 11:59 CST the world of Uld known as Mythos will be going on hiatus. On behalf of all of the Devs and Community team we want to say thank you to everyone for their support and assistance with Mythos Alpha and Beta testing and we will see you soon.
Tiggs made a post on the Official Forums stating that both the official forums of Hellgate: London and Mythos will be shutting down.
On Friday, July 18th at Midnight (CST) the forums will be shutting down. We would like to thank everyone for being a part of this wonderful community and we hope to see you all again soon.
-Tiggs
See it for yourself. Thanks for the news tip, Swordplay. You shame me with your news finding abilities sometimes.
HanbitSoft has lashed out against Flagship Studios in the Korean press, in the wake of the recent turbulence at the San Francisco-based game development studio calling them “selfish and irresponsible”. Details are as follows:
Bill Roper and Directors of Flagship Studios Bear Responsibility
- HanbitSoft making good progress in securing intellectual property rights for Hellgate: London
- HanbitSoft is preparing for a lawsuit against Bill Roper and the founding directors of Flagship Studios.
Last weekend, Flagship Studios announced that former employees were fired and HanbitSoft mentioned that all measures were proceeding as planned to the benefit of players (in Korea) to ensure that continued service of Hellgate: London would be seamless despite the current problems at its development studio. In addition, HanbitSoft holds the executives of Flagship Studios fully responsible for the incident towards the rights and interests of the users and stakeholders, including shareholders and other parties involved. HanbitSoft is considering taking strong legal action against Flagship Studios in order to take them to task for their responsibilities.
HanbitSoft does not expect to have any difficulty in securing the exclusive intellectual property rights related to Mythos. HanbitSoft is prepared to deal with Comerica bank in a local visit to them next week in order to secure and acquire the intellectual property rights of Hellgate: London. HanbitSoft believes that the game has nothing to do with the aforementioned bank as HanbitSoft already holds the rights to the game in Asia. HanbitSoft believes it has a strong possibility of acquiring the intellectual property of Hellgate: London in the United States and the rest of the world.
HanbitSoft stated that they will be devising a plan to continue work on the games with local (Korean) game developers in order to see the game through.
HanbitSoft’s CEO Kim Ki-Young stated, “Hellgate: London has a strong possibility of being ‘reborn’ into an excellent game with an outstanding product life,” he continued to say that “With more than 500 people at its disposal, both in-house and outsourced contracts who are veteran developers of every genre ranging from casual games to hardcore MMORPGs, we are ready to recreate Hellgate: London into an excellent game.”
He continued, “We don’t have to recruit existing developers, however if we could do so, we could shorten the time for analysis and developing for users. Although we are trying our best, since Flagship Studios doesn’t want to cooperate, we have no choice.”
According to HanbitSoft, they offered several methods and the means to keep Flagship alive in consideration of the users, but Flagship majorly lacked in effort. Hanbitsoft already has offered large amounts of investments but Flagship replied with ridiculous counter-offers and the negotiations went south. Even so, HanbitSoft continued to make investment offers which were all rejected, leading to the lay-offs of all of the Flagship employees.
HanbitSoft also stated, “Flagship not only lacked effort, but were only looking for personal gain. Firing all of the Flagship employees in order to protect the personal interests of its founding members only shows how selfish and irresponsible they are.”
Flagship Studios is an incorporated company. Hence if any problems occur within this company, it doesn’t affect the finances of any of Flagship Studios’ founders.
HanbitSoft said they are going to take legal proceedings as Flagship Studios is legally responsible for a serious breach of duty in not protecting their stockholder’s rights. The legal proceedings will be done against Flagship’s founders and management people for their intellectual property. HanbitSoft currently owns a 9.5% stake in Flagship Studios.
Travis Baldree, Project Lead and Programmer on Mythos created a thread on the official Mythos forum to bid his farewells to the Mythos community and other members of the Mythos team have since added their heartfelt goodbyes to the thread.
Well, it’s an interesting few days here for all of us. It’s just been killing me not to post until now, but I really needed to wait until some things were settled and announced. As you may or may not know Flagship Studios laid off almost all employees effective friday - you should be able to see the press release in the Announcements. Now, on the face of it, that really does sound like the end of Mythos as we know it - but we have a tight-knit team that feels like family and hopes to stick together. Unfortunately, I can’t speak at any real length about our immediate plans just yet - but let’s say that we hope to have you back up and Beta testing for us in one way or another sometime soon.
You’ve been an incredible community that we’ve all felt priveleged to be a part of, and we’re not quite ready to let go of that little family just yet. No matter the outcome, this has been a fantastic experience, and I and the team would like to thank each and every one of you for the tireless hours of testing and discussion you’ve undergone, and the uniquely friendly community spirit that you all helped foster. It’s been a treat every step of the way.
So, I’m not exactly sure how long Mythos in its current form will remain up, since it is effectively a testing server. I’ll try to get you that information as soon as I can.
In the meantime, I know the rest of the team would love to post their farewells and thanks to all of you. We’ll try to keep you as up to date as we can in one way or another.
Thanks again to all of you - and I hope to be seeing all of you online again very, very soon.
Travis
Others of Flagship Studios who have contributed their farewells and goodbyes to the thread include:
Greg Brown
Thanks everyone.
It has been a pleasure to be a part of this game and this community. Like Travis said, it has been very difficult to sit aside and read these forums and not be able to comment or shed light. Thank you for your dedication to helping us create and improve this game. We will miss it.
This is not the last you will hear from us. Take care and good gaming.
-Greg
Jason “Grimby” Beck
I definitely want to echo Travis’ sentiments about this community. It’s truly amazing how friendly, helpful, and open it was. It’s been a very rare experience and one that we all enjoyed tremendously.
I really can’t say enough about this team, either. I’ve known some of these guys for years now and it’s a real joy to work with friends everyday. The entire team is easily the best I’ve been apart of. It’s just a cool group of people who happen to be both easy to work with and really good at what they do.
I’m quite certain you’ll be hearing from us soon. It’s very sad to see Mythos (as we know it) go…I got pretty attached to them Ramalos …, but we’ll be doing something again.
Thanks for all the cool comments. It was rough reading up on everything without being able to respond.
It’s been a treat!
Cheers,
Jason
Kyle “Skycrickett” Cornelius
I am just going to quote Jason since he pretty much hit the nail on the head. It sucks having to leave without finishing this project up… but I guess thats how things happen sometimes. I am proud to have contributed to Mythos, and really hope that you guys see us in some incarnation in the future. As a former member of the community - turned professional scribbler, I can say it was a pleasure to have you guys testing our game.
-Kyle
Adam Perin
It is a sad day to lose such a great community. I hope in the future we will be so lucky as to have such a great community again. I personally will miss seeing such great community interaction (with us and with eachother) and genuienly helpful people on teh interwebs that are trying to help us make something even better than what we planned.
-adam
Taylor Balbi
I’ve said it a million times. You guys are the best. In all the years that I have worked with communities, paid and for fun, this is by far the greatest group of people ever. You guys were always very supportive, very kind, and seriously…. it killed me that I didn’t get to ban anyone lol. You guys were always ready for new stuff and rarely complained about bugs and features, great group of supporters. There were just so many people who loved Mythos and helped make it the game it is today. Whether Mythos picks up in the future or not, you guys rock. I will be around in one way or another.
If the opportunity arises I would love to have the chance to work on Mythos again. The main reason is you guys. Thanks for being there and always supporting us. It really meant a lot to us every time you sent in e-mails or messages about how much you love the game and can’t put it down.
No matter the future of Mythos, you know that you can count on me to be around any project Travis and the gang works on. See you around guys, it was a good run and the best job I ever had.
History will, perhaps, remember Mythos as one of those “great games that should have been”, along with Black Isle Studios’ Van Buren and Troika’s post-apocalyptic RPG. Hope may yet exist for the game, so we’ll be crossing our fingers for a miracle.
Flagship Studios’ TRICIA GRAY, Director of Global MarComm, sent over an official press release to me, which states the following:
Flagship Studios Still in Operations
San Francisco, CA (July 15, 2008) — Flagship Studios has announced today that despite rumors to the contrary, the company is still operating.
“It is with deep regret that I must announce that Flagship Studios has laid off most employees. However, the core management and founding team members are still at Flagship.” said Bill Roper, CEO of Flagship Studios. “The past five years have been an incredible experience for us, but unfortunately, we couldn’t sustain the size of the company any longer.”
Flagship Studios owns the rights to all its technology and IP, including Hellgate: London and Mythos. Due to the current situation, Flagship will not be taking any new subscribers for Hellgate: London, and all current subscriptions will not be billed.
Flagship wishes to extend their heartfelt thanks to those that have supported the company and games over the past five years.
About Flagship Studios
Flagship Studios is a creator of innovative entertainment software, designing games that focused on ease of play, replayability, and fun. The studio was formed in 2003 by former executives and developers from Blizzard North® and represents the creators of the worldwide, best-selling Diablo® franchise. With members that are renowned within the gaming industry, Flagship Studios and its Flagship Seattle division embodies a team that has worked together for over a decade and have numerous #1-selling games and multiple Game of the Year awards to their credit.
Regardless of the press release, it’s anyone’s guess as to how Flagship Studios will be able to support Hellgate: London or Mythos at this point in time without its developers.
Korean news website TheGames.co.kr got in touch with HanbitSoft chief executive, Kim Ki-young regarding the recent reports of Flagship Studios’ demise and asked him to clarify the situation with Hellgate: London and Mythos.
As it’s known to the general public that Flagship Studios dismissed developers of ‘Hellgate: London’ and closed down the office, HanbitSoft is trying to prepare countermeasures.
According to game industry news on the 14th, HanbitSoft is checking whether the rumor is true that Flagship Studios has determined to dismiss employees. HanbitSoft announced that this incident is totally unrelated with ‘Hellgate: London’ and ‘Mythos’ services.
HanbitSoft owns intellectual property rights of ‘Mythos’, and ‘Hellgate: London’ is also provided to investors of Flagship Studios and HanbitSoft, so it’s impossible that Flagship Studios receives investments from third parties, or sign contracts with any other companies regarding these products.
HanbitSoft said they have been preparing various business models, required game development and other improvements to compensate for Flagship Studios’ crisis.
According to Kim Ki-young of HanbitSoft, he said that ‘if we can take intellectual property rights of relevant products from Flagship Studios, we have confidence to develop the games ourselves based on T3 Entertainment’s advanced technology’ and ‘we believe we can service fresh and interesting games to online gamers by getting intellectual property rights and development. This crisis could be an opportunity for us’.
HanbitSoft is about to start thorough examination to get intellectual property rights for ‘Hellgate: London’ and ‘Mythos’ once Flagship Studios petitions for bankruptcy
HanbitSoft said although they have suggested mutual conditions regarding investments in Flagship Studios, Flagship requested that HanbitSoft provide better terms, leading to hesitation on HanbitSoft’ part in aiding Flagship.
Flagship’s Community Manager, Taylor Balbi, has revealed to VE3D that all Ping0 and Flagship Studios staff have been made redundant. According to Taylor and the VE3D article, employees were notified at a company meeting and subsequently informed that the offices will be officially closed on Saturday. The source went on to reveal that three of the studio’s top brass dug into their own pockets to provide 30 days of pay to all employees.
As mentioned earlier, word of the studio’s closure reached HanbitSoft, leading to an early press release regarding the control over the Hellgate: London intellectual property that lead to a stern rebuttal from an official source in Flagship Studios, which, subsequently lead to a HanbitSoft lawyer posting the following sentence on our very website: “It is unfortunate that Flagship turned down additional investments HanbitSoft offered to make that would have allowed it to keep its doors open.”
As also referenced in the legal release, HanbitSoft hopes to independently continue development of Mythos, to which it owns the rights thanks to a loan agreement enacted with Flagship. Comerica now owns the Hellgate: London rights through a similar loan agreement, and will likely continue Asian development with HanbitSoft. As for English-language releases of the two games, it is possible that the Asian companies would continue development, but the fate of the US, Japanese and European version of Hellgate: London remain a mystery.
In short, Flagship’s time has run out, and all intellectual property may have been lost, all staff fired, and the studio closed. Flagship, we hardly knew ye…
Further Confirmation: A person going by the name of GLC who is claiming to be a former employee of Ping0 has made the following post on SomethingAwful to further confirm the company’s demise:
Former Ping0 employee checking in here. I feel bad for some of the talented guys on the staff who busted rear end to try and get a game out on a ridiculous schedule, but I think we all kind of saw this coming after the game came out and basically bombed. Flagship bit off way more than they could chew and made a lot of development and structural mistakes in how they went about things. They had a lot of big dreamers on staff, but not enough nitty-gritty people who knew how to get shit done. It sucks, but that’s life I guess. I didn’t always agree with the decisions of the leadership, but it doesn’t surprise me at all to hear that three of them (probably Roper and the Schaeffers) dug into their own pockets to pay people. Nothing about them, Max Schaeffer in particular, ever made me think they were less than standup guys.
I think it’s less that they aimed too high than that they tried to aim that high and do it quickly, and they didn’t do anything the easy way. They had their own server architecture, their own client, their own chat, their own graphics engine, their own everything basically. Plus they wanted a game that could support thousands of concurrent connections with no downtime, had an engaging single-player campaign, and could support an ongoing, persistent world. It was like picking everything that’s hard to do in a game, and then putting it on a brand-new company (two of them, really) with people who hadn’t worked together before.
Plus you had Ping0 doing the back-end and multiplayer, working off a forked codebase, and trying to make sure that what they were designing was open enough that it could be marketed to other companies. And then Mythos, with a team working out of Seattle under Travis Baldtree (who is a fucking genius, by the way), which had to fit into things somehow even though it wasn’t as much of a priority. It was just a really chaotic situation all around. Hopefully the talented guys I met there will bounce back quickly, it’s a lovely time to be unemployed in the bay area.
Kotaku’s closure story contains further confirmation from their own anonymous source.
Amol Deshpande, Chris Schillinger, Jesse Jones and Ray Li all list their Flagship-Ping0 positions as having ended in July 2008.
Update: The official forum appears to be no longer moderated is inundated in spam.
Update: Programmer Producer Patrick Harris now has his positions at Flagship Studios listed as ‘past jobs’ and is no longer employed at Flagship Studios.
Update: Eric Liu is no longer in the employ of Flagship-Ping0. Having served for seven months as a QA Manager and Automation Engineer, he was promoted in October 2007 to International Producer, a position he held until the studio’s closure.
Update: Flagship-Ping0’s IT Manager, Brent Shinn, Grant Watters, Greg Brown and Jonathan McEvoy are the latest Flagship-Ping0 employees to have listed their positions as previous experience on LinkedIn.
Update: Flagship-Ping0’s Project Manager, Jack Wood, is now also an ex-employee. Jack had many important responsibilities, including: stakeholder, investor and regional distributor liaising; final say on all patch and product launches; and oversight of day-to-day end user support.
Update: Lead Graphics Engineer, Chris Lambert, is the latest to go. Chris was with the company for four years.
Update: With the help of one of our readers, we discovered that the poster going by the name of GLC on SomethingAwful is none other than one “Kalan Kier”, former Ping0 QA Manager.
According to GLC’s Something Awful user profile, his AIM screen name is “kkieratnl”.
A quick search on Google for “kkieratnl” reveals an archived forum post by GLC.
A further search on LinkedIn for “Kalan Kier” reveals that according to Kalan Kier’s LinkedIn profile, he was never a Ping0 employee. However, the LinkedIn Directory appears to have cached his former profile’s headline which indicates that he served as a QA Manager at Ping0.
Update: Diane “Tiggs” Migliaccio claims that Hellgate players won’t be charged even if they are unable to unsubscribe due to the feature’s removal from account pages and is locking discussions related to the very subject, subsequently directing them to a ‘main thread’, in which she allows spam and posts her own; preventing any serious discussion from taking place.
Coincidentally, Diane publicly launched her own community support company the day after Flagship’s closure was made public.
Update: Community Manager Taylor Balbi publically denies having anything to do with the statement that was made to VE3D.
“Nothing Official has been stated about what is going on, everything you see or hear is speculation and rumors.”
In breaking news, Korean news website TheGames.co.kr reports that HanbitSoft is taking full control over the Hellgate: London intellectual property from Flagship Studios. At present, HanbitSoft co-owns the IP, which was developed by Flagship Studios and published by Electronic Arts in Europe and the United States.
HanbitSoft states that the reason it is pursuing this course of action is because “It is hard for us to accept Flagship Studios’ requests for continued support in capital and funding any longer and because Flagship was being difficult”, and because it co-owns a direct stake in the IP, it therefore “has a say in reviewing and determining any course of action to be taken with Hellgate: London.”
HanbitSoft is expected to take full control over the IP. HanbitSoft goes on to state that in doing so, it will be able to “properly manage and develop Hellgate: London into a good game with proper content”, with its own in-house team of developers.
The report further states that the online service of Hellgate: London, which started in January 15, 2008 acquired 100,000 early users within the first two weeks of operation during which time HanbitSoft earned 3 billion won (approximately 3 million USD) for the sales of Hellgate: London in Korea. However, the number of players in the game significantly declined due to the lack of general out-of-the-box content and the sparsity of ongoing content updates. Since its Open Beta launch, Hellgate: London has gone from being the 9th most played game in Korea to 52nd post-commercial launch. (Source)
It’s anyone’s guess at this point as to what will happen to the Hellgate: London development team at Flagship Studios in San Francisco and how this will affect the development of Mythos, Flagship’s other game.
UPDATE: Flagship Studios has sent Hellgate Guru an official response via e-mail with regards to the story:
This story is an outright lie. We have no idea where they are getting their information from and have asked legal counsel to pursue the issue. We are mystified by Hanbitsoft’s conclusions and any attempt to take over the IP will be met with a strong and swift response, to “illegally take over the IP”. All right title and interest in Hellgate; London resides in Flagship Financing, LLC a wholly-owned subsidiary of Flagship Studios. We are outraged that Hanbitsoft would attempt to completely tarnish the reputation of its most vital developer. Hanbitsoft’s new management clearly does not understand the terms of its relationship with Flagship.
Because the story is already public, we feel that we would be doing a great disservice to the public by removing it from existence. We do however feel that it is only fair for us to publish an official response from Flagship Studios itself.
UPDATE #2: Respected industry website GamaSutra has confirmed massive layoffs are taking place at Flagship Studios today.
Gamasutra has received confirmation from a Flagship Studios representative that the Hellgate: London developer has seen significant staff cuts.
This morning, Gamasutra obtained information from a source close to the company indicating that staff at both the Flagship development team as well as online services subsidiary Ping0 were let go. Both companies operate out of the same building.
UPDATE #3: Someone claiming to be a lawyer representing HanbitSoft has requested for us to remove the story. We are ready to comply, but only if other websites and news sites reporting the story agree to do so as well:
We are U.S. attorneys for HanbitSoft. Your story is a repeat of a quote that is not accurate and we request that you pull it down. At the request of Flagship’s attorney, we must correct the record:
Please understand that the facts are (1) HanbitSoft is an exclusive licensee of both Hellgate and Mythos in Asia, with rights to sublicense the games; (2) in addition, HanbitSoft is a secured creditor who has been pledged the Mythos (but not the Hellgate) intellectual property as collateral for a loan; (3) Comerica, another secured lender, has been pledged the Hellgate intellectual property as its collateral for a loan; (4) Flagship Studios does not currently own the intellectual properties to either game, which are held in separate companies subject to the security interests of lenders, and Flagship Studios’ interest in those companies is also pledged to its lenders; (5) it is unfortunate that Flagship turned down additional investments HanbitSoft offered to make that would have allowed it to keep its doors open, but HanbitSoft hopes to work with Comerica and some of the team at Flagship to see if there is a way to continue to generate content to keep Hellgate online in Asia and to finish the development of Mythos.
UPDATE #4: Several of our readers have sent in word that the Subscription options within the Accounts page on the official website have disappeared, as has the ability to unsubscribe.
UPDATE #5: VE3D got in touch with Scapes
In a telephone conversation Flagship’s Community Manager, Evan “Scapes” Berman, refused to comment on the current situation at the studio, or whether he was still in the employment of the company. Instead, he insisted that I direct all questions to ex-Blizzard man, Bill Roper. As of this time neither Bill Roper, Tricia Gray (Flagship’s PR representative) or HanbitSoft’s lawyers have responded to email inquiries.
Hellgate Guru was founded in mid-2005 and has ever since been one of the most popular fan sites and forums devoted to Hellgate: London, catering to a wide range of interests, as well as having a dedicated team of staff members who keep the website full of constant updates, news and generate activity and hype around the game. More
…, but we’ll be doing something again.
