Flagship Studios' Founder Discusses Its Demise 117
1Up is running a lengthy interview with Bill Roper, founder of Flagship Studios. The game company, known primarily for its Hellgate: London and Mythos titles, announced massive layoffs last month, and is now simply winding down and taking care of a few final issues. Roper gives quite a bit of detail regarding the financial machinations of a game developer and the current status of the games' code. Co-founders Max Schaefer and Travis Baldree gave a related interview recently as well.
"The subscription money we did get, we all poured directly into keeping the game online, keeping it up and running. But the development demands far outstripped the revenues. There just wasn't a good contemplation early on of how that would work. It wasn't like: This is the budget that comes in every month; we'll do whatever we can do with that. We just said [that] development will get done out of the revenues, and whoever pays for development, they get paid back out of the revenues. And there wasn't really enough revenues coming in to cover the expected and required development."
Classic Story (Score:5, Interesting)
This happens in a lot of businesses where development plus operations costs are greater than the revenues generated. Without enough incoming cash to go around, the development effort fails. Without a good development effort, the revenue increases fail. It becomes a really nasty Catch-22.
It's actually similar to building a consulting business to the point that office and sales staff is necessary. It's very difficult to grow fast enough to pay the overhead.
In a lot of businesses, it's necessary to either be very small and lean, or huge enough that the overhead is minimal in proportion to "productive" and "billable" efforts.
Being in the middle is the most dangerous place of all.
Re:Even if you don't like Hellgate, it's a shame (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a difficult situation. And if you're trying to start a new development house, it must be very difficult to accurately estimate how much money you'll need to get you all the way to a finished product. I wonder if they just ran out of money and had to publish something in order to keep going at all...
Daikatana (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Different how? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a Diablo clone set in a post apocalyptic future. It's hardly innovative.
It's first person. It completely changes the feel of the game compared to a Diablo clone, so that was pretty innovative. And it had some pretty unique weapons for a Diablo clone, my favorite being a napalm launcher.
Re:And this is why... (Score:4, Interesting)
They gave away too much contol, and were forced to ship early by other corporations. They tried to do too many things at once...
It's a damn shame, too - it was a decent enough game idea, that might have turned out well if they had spent enough time on it, and focused more on world design and content than technological infrastructure.
I can attest to that. My roommate got hired at EA to work on Hellgate last August, and nearly everyday he'd come home saying something like "This game is going to suck. It could be awesome, but EA wants it out by Halloween and it won't be good if we do that." One of his big sticking points was that in all of their marketing they were touting the multiplayer stuff, but the dev side hadn't even started working on the multiplayer aspect as of Mid-September, and the game was supposed to release a month later? Their solution was "We'll patch it in later."
Re:release a crappy product (Score:5, Interesting)
Unless you're the kind who preorders or camp the store on release day, just because the hype sounds good, yes, you _could_ find out. The fact that there's no actual content for your subscription money, for example, was common knowledge within days.
Honestly, I wish that the meme that buyers are a bunch of isolated, gullible dolts, would just die already. Even the MPAA and RIAA discovered recently that, what do you know? People call or text each other to tell their friends stuff like, "man, this movie sucked, stay away from it" or "dude, it was great, you should really see it too."
I don't know exactly why would it be less true for games. And there's plenty of empyrical evidence that points at the fact that, say, more polished games sell more copies. Plenty of times contrary to what those review magazines were telling people. I still have a game on the shelf there which got good reviews and sold 800 copies IIRC. (That's a homeopathic quantity in that industry, btw.) Nobody knows why.
I mean, seriously, humans had a society and were telling each other things like "ugh, heap plenty antelopes that way" 100,000 years ago. We had whole spreads of technologies and civilization based on the fact that people were even taking the time to write a letter on a papyrus to cousin Bubba-ho-tep in Thebes to tell him about this new thing they tried. We're like the bees in that aspect.
Did anyone really expect that a few millions of years of evolution would just go away just because Mr Marketer snapped his fingers?
Now I'm not saying that marketing doesn't work at all. It does. But it's a lot less alpha and omega than those people sell themselves as.