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."
release a crappy product (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:release a crappy product (Score:5, Informative)
Even with the bugs it was quite playable I found. The missing content was the annoying part to it, but you couldn't really find out about that until you bought it.
Initial release quality is important if you want to have an impact with game review magazines. Not everyone bases their buy decision off these magazines, but I think enough do for it to really hurt a game if they get a couple bad reviews. Especially in the PC game market where there are so many new games released every year, and where gamers are generally more literate (sorry xbox gamers, but it's true).
Re:release a crappy product (Score:5, Funny)
You're xbox gamr thing is just a sterotype, idio.t
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Mod parent down, Score: -1, Recursive
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You're xbox gamr thing is just a sterotype, idio.t
Actually your response and lack of spelling, grammar, and punctuation usage ability underscores his point quite nicely.
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You must be new here...
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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.
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Did anyone really expect that a few millions of years of evolution would just go away just because Mr Marketer snapped his fingers?
Those same few millions of years of evolution eventually lead to Mr. Marketer...
We would have been better of with Dinosaurs.
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beyond seconded. Mod up please.
First, the game was complete crap. Repetitive, moderately interesting, and horribly coded with crappy multiplayer policies. You were paying to multiplay for a free single player game. WTF? The game itself was creative looking, had a nice storyline and skill plan, but jesus there were some serious things wrong.
They made a crappy beyond all measure product that additionally ran like crap without DX10. Thank Nvidia for that fiasco.
What's the sad thing? If they opened up the sourc
Re:release a crappy product (Score:5, Insightful)
Six months after release, the technical quality of the game was fine (it was still lacking in content). Flagship was forced to ship 6 months before they were ready, because they had so mismanaged the business side that they lost control. This game didn't fail because of poor developers, but poor business management (including not hiring enough content developers to go with the software developers).
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see spire's response to you. I agree with him. It wasn't poor business management dude, it was just a shitty game. Technical quality was horrible (DX10 issues much?) It was like 30FPS difference from DX9 at release, IIRC.
Really you can have the most wonderful business management in the world but a 10 pound bag of shit is still a 10 pound bag of shit.
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The game had many technical issues at release (hell, you often couldn't see the members of your group, the multiplayer code was so half-baked), but not very many six months later at the date the studio wanted to release in the first place. When the head of the studio can't control the release date, that's bad business management, not poor engineering.
Also, how much can you blame the *game* that Vista's peformance blows goats? But that's a topic for a differnt forum.
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Unless you're a farmer, then it's a 10 pound bag of fertilizer!
Unless you're a gold farmer, then it's what you use for a mattress!
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This isn't entirely true. They made some very very bad design decisions early on that downright doubled the cost of content development.
The entire game was based on levels randomly put together from a set of tiles. This was the big appeal, unique levels.
The problem is that in order to have high and low quality settings, instead of having an engine that can scale high polygon models down to low polygon models, their engine requires them to make high quality AND low quality models and then because the HQ text
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I got tapped for their last round of testing right before they released. I was excited as hell at first, but I guess it wasn't that big a deal in retrospect... seems like everybody I know got in on it.
Anyway, I played the game in beta, and hated it. I know it was a beta produc
Well, it's even worse (Score:2)
Well, actually it's even funnier than that.
1. As the summary says, they were counting on lots of monthly subscriptions to keep development going. It was pretty much the MMO model, but...
2. in a game which, honestly, did't offer much reason to fork over cash monthly.
And I say that as a guy who's currently paying 3 subscriptions to 3 different MMOs. I don't have a problem with paying monthly, in a game where I feel I'm getting the content or gaming experience worth that money. Hellgate just offered no good re
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I really don't understand this talk. I picked up the preorder to get in the beta for $10, so I played it from beta. It definitely had technical problems in beta, and they weren't really fixed until the first patch *after* release. So I can see where it got itself a bit of a bad name. It also required more RAM than any other game out at the time (1.5Gig on Vista).
However, the game itsel
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The biggest issue they had was setting a release date in stone, and then spending so much money hyping it (release on Oct 31st, aka Halloween) that they had to release it, bugs and all. I was in the open beta for the month prior to release, and no matter how many bug notices we submitted, they didn't get fixed before release. They really needed to put the release on hold for 6 months, but their marketing department wouldn't let them (or partner deals, etc).
Even if you don't like Hellgate, it's a shame (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a shame when a studio that is at least trying something different goes under. It was a shame that Hellgate was basically a beta product until only recently. If you release a finished product at the start then you don't have to pay for developers from your monthly revenue.
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...
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That obviously wasn't the case, otherwise they wouldn't have been forced to release (at least) 6 months early, now would they?
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It sounded as if all the money was going into development just to keep the thing going.
A properly released product would allow a large portion of the revenue to go to new development.
Different how? (Score:2)
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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.
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Ah, so it's a NetHack/Angband derivative...
Sure, if you consider a FPS with loot to be a roguelike.
But that's like calling Super Mario Bros a Pac-Man derivative. They're different enough to not really be comparable.
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How is a napalm launcher all that unique? What about that gun that pees out swarms of bees?
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Lay down a blanket of fire on the ground, then switch to a explosive bolt launcher to finish off your enemies. THEN tell me how ho-hum it is.
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It's first person. It completely changes the feel of the game compared to a Diablo clone, so that was pretty innovative.
A first-person game where you shoot guns?! I don't know if an idea that innovative could ever catch on.
Now, if they added space marines, they might just be on to something.
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It's first person. It completely changes the feel of the game compared to a Diablo clone, so that was pretty innovative.
A first-person game where you shoot guns?! I don't know if an idea that innovative could ever catch on.
That's kind of like saying Deus Ex is just another FPS with some RPG elements. A game is more than just the genre it belongs to. Just because you want to categorize it doesn't mean it doesn't bring something new to the table.
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I own both Deus Ex and Hellgate. I didn't find either to be terribly impressive, though I'll grant that Deus Ex was innovative.
As for Hellgate, the shooter aspect didn't add much to Diablo, and the Diablo aspect didn't add much to a shooter. Either way it was pretty lame.
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Deus Ex wasn't terribly innovative. System Shock 2 had most of the same ideas years before, and System Shock 1 had most of THOSE ideas years and years before.
The difference is, Deus Ex did some things right that System Shock 2 didn't, like making their guns more durable than styrofoam cups.
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Sorry to reply again, but I think my post was incomplete.
If you want to see an innovative shooter/RPG look at Mass Effect. It's both a purer shooter than Hellgate and a better RPG. Granted, there's no multiplayer, but I've never been impressed with muhmorpergers as RPGs.
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It's first person.
Did you even play Hellgate?
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"It's a shame when a studio that is at least trying something different goes under."'
I'd like to deal with this statement, because it implies "If only games were different (i.e. creative), then somehow this implies difference is awesome".
I don't buy a word of it, the problem with hellgate was that it was a diablo rip off in 3D, and a poor one at that. It copied many aspects of diablo but lost the experience of diablo.
The whole point of hellgate was "spiritual diablo clone", it was all over the gaming news
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There was nothing different about HGL.
It was Diablo 2 with guns - except it was worse than Diablo 2 gameplay in every way imaginable.
Itemization was worse.
Skill tree was worse.
Level design was worse.
Look and feel was worse.
Boss encounters were worse.
Multiplayer was worse. (How many people did you group with?)
It was in no way any more innovative than a $20 budget bin Diablo clone.
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What are you talking about? Hellgate was very consciously a Diablo ripoff. That was even in their marketing.
The problem was that Hellgate was TOO much like Diablo, complete with auto-generated dungeons, mindless hack n' slash, and tons of bugs.
Frankly, I think that Flagship was really greedy. They basically wanted to charge $20 a month for a game that was released for $50 total in 1997. As other people have pointed out, MMOs offer an entire online world with lots of content for their $20 per month. This gam
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Online play was free.
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There was a free online service AND a paid premium service. People who paid got leaderboards, PvP play, and were promised additional content. If subscribers had actually received the bonus content, it might have been worth it. They didn't. PvP really didn't work either. Basically they charged people for nothing. And I'm talking in the past tense because, unlike a real MMO, they're making no effort to maintain the service and abruptly discontinued it.
I really wanted to like Hellgate: London. But the incredib
And this is why... (Score:5, Insightful)
And people wonder why VC firms are so obsessed about the cash flow of startups (after learning their lessons of the 90s).
Re:And this is why... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly right. Bill Roper and company knew how to write a game - Diablo is evidence enough of that - but in a story that seems to endlessly repeat, a bunch of engineers who knew little about the business side decided to go into business for themselves, and failed horribly through no lack of engineering skill. You *have* to understand the money side to make the business work.
And Flagship made every stupid newb mistake they could. They gave away too much contol, and were forced to ship early by other corporations. They tried to do too many things at once, because there was no business manager to put his foot down and force them to focus on the core game, and made sure that resources got allocated to content, not just technology. They didn't have an "after we launch" plan to ensure things would be profitable either, which ensured their demise.
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.
Re:And this is why... (Score:5, Insightful)
The theory is rather easy, in practise it's rather hard. Ship too early and you're bugzilla, ship too late and you're "outdated" or worse. Why do you give away control? Well, because those you give up control to are usually the ones funding you. If the VCs pull out, usually the whole thing fizzles. The core game usually means things that have been done before, so you need something creative and different and it better be good. A lot of it just does not work out, so it feels like you've spent far too much money on things you shouldn't but otherwise you probably wouldn't have found the killer features either. A working engine with little content is a poor game, good content with poor engine is no game at all. The answer is of course that you need money for both, which leads to more VC money, which leads to less control... "After we launch" is something you can have in MMORPGs and whatnot to prevent churn, in most other ganres and even in MMORPGs you're toast if the game isn't flying high already from launch. If you just got off the runway and the plane is on fire, no follow-up plan will save you.
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."
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You're full of shit. EA never hired anyone at any point to work on HGL.
HGL was only ever touched by Flagship employees as they are the only ones who had any kind of access to the code.
EA only worked on the marketing/packaging aspects of the game in the US.
Oh and EA didn't set the release date. It was set by Flagship as they were out of money in the fall.
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Where do you keep getting the idea that Flagship was forced to ship early.
This is simply not true. Nobody forced Flagship to ship early but their own lack of financial planning.
Flagship alone set the release date. They even said so themselves over and over.
So who's to blame? (Score:1)
The game had quite a good atmosphere and the quantity and quality of monsters and loot were very high. But with its repetitive combat and generic levels, this game was bound to be a bad selling one.
Maybe piracy did help a bit there, because people could see that it wasn't even worth it to buy a real copy, as to use it for the multiplayer part (which was shit too).
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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:Classic Story (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that revenues should not cover development plus operations. Revenues should cover amortisation on the development costs, plus your overhead and cost of goods sold.
The problem is that most software business are heavy on the development costs early on, so *cash flow* is the issue, not profitability. This can be overcome by owner investment, outside investment (VC)... to overcome the cash flow problem by reducing development is just shooting yourself in the foot.
Of course, if you're going to sink money into a venture, you want to make sure that the future has a good likelihood of paying off well... and you can be damn sure that VCs want to be assured of that as well. Like he said in TFA, they didn't have a post-release plan or budget, and they never bothered to figure out if they'd be cash-positive, or even if they'd be profitable.
BTW, the same is true for your consulting business example -- this is especially true for hiring a sales force. Admin overhead is scalable (part-time help, etc), but good sales staff are *expensive* and less scalable -- and the results aren't immediately shown in the cash stream. This is why most successful small consulting businesses are dependent on the owner making most of the sales, and are owned by good salespeople (along with other talents).
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Like he said in TFA, they didn't have a post-release plan or budget, and they never bothered to figure out if they'd be cash-positive, or even if they'd be profitable.
Which is really stupid, because if they had spent just a few weeks or months putting together a solid business plan, they could have come up with the financial statements necessary to either a.) show considerable growth potential and attract VC funding or b.) convince themselves the idea was unworkable and quit while they were ahead.
With the combination of their previous resumes at Blizzard and a solid business plan, they would have been fighting off VCs with a stick. Unfortunately, they did none of that,
Business without Business Plan Fails (Score:2, Funny)
Missing the obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc/hellgatelondon [metacritic.com]
Pretty much all the reviews point out that while it's a nice enough game, it's competitors are similar if not better, are cheaper, and were already out there. Hellgate was well polished but dull is what it sounds like, and there were better products out there.
There was no money coming in because your product wasn't competitive.
While I hate to see people lose their jobs, and sincerely hope all the people who created the game get hired again quickly at studios with better guidance, it's somewhat of a relief to me that creative financial management couldn't be used to make a bad game into a success. There are a glut of games on the wii especially but consoles in general that aren't worth a dime because they're bankrupt in the innovation and creativity department. It would be nice if those games weren't made.
I personally prefer games that aren't as polished graphically but have great concepts. They're more fun to play as well as being cheaper. It's nice when they're both, but the old adage about a horse built by comittee is a camel rings true. A small group of individuals can often come up with a better, riskier idea for a game than you'll get coming out of a big studio, at the small price of not having overdone graphics.
Here's to hoping that EA will suffer the same fate.
Re:Missing the obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as there are people out there that are willing to paint their beer bellies in bright colours and grunt "Mad-den" loudly as means of communication, there's no chance that EA will ever fail.
Having worked for the gaming industry, I will say that it is going the way of the music industry. That is, they don't want to risk anything on something really new, so they repeat the old formula, with more bling.
The problem is that a game costs so much more than an album, so a game failing just a little has as big impact as if a hundred albums all flopped. You have to gamble. And you'd think that games producers would be interested in a gamble too -- after all, that's what games are. But no, they won't. They'd rather play it safe, which in all cases (except EA and their license to print money) is dooming yourself. You might survive your first "OK but boring" flop, and the second one too, but you won't make money either, and will eventually have to fold.
Where are the new innovative games? Have there been any innovative games since Populous and Elite? Perhaps, but very few. Hellgate: London most certainly wasn't one.
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Thank god for exceptions. Yes, there have been innovative games.
Like I was saying, indie gaming with digital distribution is very promising, so it's not all doom and gloom. Braid is of course the buzz word on the interwebs right now. Big studio releases are indeed lacking in the innovations, but there are enough conterexamples to not despair yet for the big industry.
Valve, or whoever was responsible for Portal, earns major points for portal. That was a very unique game, plus it had all the advantages yo
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Almost everything that manages to make it over here from Japan is golden. I'm aware that there's a filter keeping a lot of the crap games from making the jump, but there's still great games from over there.
I'll eat some negative moderations to laugh publicly at your "nearly all Japanese games sold in America (presumably where you live) are fantastically innovative" theory.
Ha.
Who will find me first, the unreasonably anti-Japanese mods or the Nintendog-fan mods? Go!
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I DID mention that there was a filter keeping the crap off my radar. That wasn't a qualified enough statement for you? How about the one I was replying to "Where are the new innovative games? Have there been any innovative games since Populous and Elite? "
THAT isn't an overstatement?!?
I'll allow that I was thinking of final fantasy (innovative for such a cash cow, compare to madden) Katamari damancy, elebits, nintendo's stuff.
Oh, and don't forget their arcade games. I saw a virtual "dog walking" game. A
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Where are the new innovative games? Have there been any innovative games since Populous and Elite? Perhaps, but very few. Hellgate: London most certainly wasn't one.
Honestly, EA has done a very good job redefining themselves. They're resurrecting old, popular franchises, and actually doing them justice. Command and Conquer and Red Alert 3 actually go back to their predecessors' FMV roots. This is a far cry from the lame cash grab that was Generals.
Upcoming games... Dead Space - a new franchise that's supposed to be Silent Hill in space. The recent Battlefield Bad Company (a sitcom + FPS?)... and Mirror's Edge all look VERY VERY good. Spore is also a no brainer.
They're
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Personally I preferred the game design of Generals over the RA or Tiberium serieses but the actual implementation had flaws. What shouldn't be forgotten is that EA was one of the first companies to actually handle the Wii properly, especially their sports division (the casual games division might not be so smart).
Re:Missing the obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
It wasn't even all that well polished. I think the real problem was, and this is mentioned in the interview, is that Blizzard had several superhits under its belt and that creates a very different environment. Blizzard could basically take as long as they needed on their games, because their track record gave investors confidence that it would pay off for them. Flagship had no such luxury and they had to release the game far sooner than they would have liked because there was no more money for more time.
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I didn't find hellgate to be annoyingly buggy (there were bugs, but none gamebreaking
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The thing that some people seem to not have noticed is that recently EA have actually become one of the better labels when it comes to innovation and quality gameplay. Examples - Mirror's Edge, Dead Space, Mass Effect, Portal, TF2, Skate, Spore - I could go on. Sure there's a lot of sports games as always, but EA also has a lot of the more interesting games out there.
If you want someone to hate on, Activition is the new EA [sarcasticgamer.com].
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Mirror's Edge, yet another FPS.
You're full of it. It's more like a first-person Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2N1TJP1cxmo&fmt=6 [youtube.com]
Also, from Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
"Although the player character can hold weapons, O'Brien stressed that "this is an action adventure. We're not positioning this as a shooter - the focus isn't on the gun, it's on the person." Gameplay in Mirror's Edge will focus on finding the best route through the game's environments while combat takes a secondary role.[5] Consequently, guns may be obta
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This couldn't be more wrong. It's a hybrid of established genres (FPS and action RPG), sure, but there's nothing else out there that's the same mixture. The problem is the game was very poorly polished, with tons of bugs and many ambitious features falling short of expectations. For example, there are random 3d levels, but they're very bland. There are a few unique quests, like a pseudo-RTS or a capture-the-flag style game, but they're poorly executed.
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Agree with this.
The game had some really cool ideas, but it desperately needed another 6 months of polishing before release -- and Blizzard probably would have given it another 18.
They cut a bad demo for the game, and the originally available content also wasn't great, overall, although small parts of it were. There's no second chance at that first impression, and I'm sure a ton of people either played the demo and gave the game a pass entirely or tried it out and decided not to subscribe.
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Business wise, creativity isn't always a good thing [wordpress.com]. What you need is not creativity, it's simply the ability to make what people really want instead of making what you want and say they should want. That doesn't necessarily mean sequels, it does mean innovation where innovation is needed but it also means no innovation where it isn't needed and, most importantly, innovating in a way that the customer actually wants. The designer is not the customer. The vocal minorities on the internet are very few custome
Mythos (Score:3, Informative)
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Additionally, Flagship really needed to hire more content developers, and less software deveoplers for their budget. Developing two games at once, when the released game has no real content? Bad business decision!
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Mythos was not supposed to be free-as-idea or free-as-beer. It was supposed to follow Guild Wars and Diablo style:
Buy it once, play online forever for free. Then you buy expansions.
Model is quite profitable, and Ex-blizzard developer favorite one.
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I don't think this is quite right. Last I heard, it would be free-to-play too.
There would be the normal gold that you could get by grinding, and a Real Money (RM) currency. Some items could only be bought with the RM, things like experience-bonus potions and other consumables.
The nice thing would be that the RM could also be freely traded, so that someone who didn't want to buy the RM could trade found items for the RM.
Hopefully Mythos will get picked up by another studio, because I enjoyed the beta quite a
Good idea but (Score:1)
From my impression, these guys had potential to make a great game. But what happened is what never happens to Blizzard. Apparently they had to release the game before it was done.
This means they fell for the trap that is affecting a huge amount of software devs and software companies out there. The MS effect. Make a product that "promises" to be bigger and better than the competition, and then lose your ability to create a simple product that is codeable in a short amount of time... and turns into unpolishe
Translation (Score:2)
- We're pretty good at making games, but don't really know dick about running a company
- Turns out there were some other people there at Blizzard that knew what they were doing, and we didn't know how good they were until we didn't have them
- WoW and it's 11 million subscribers means you have to really bring something special to the table if you expect to get any of the scraps left over, and we didn't do that
Go back to Blizzard, Bill. I'm sure they could use someone to help get Warcraft 4 off the ground.
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Daikatana (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Bland.. (Score:1)
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On the other hand, they probably wouldn't hav
I enjoyed this game but... (Score:1)
This is too bad. I really enjoyed Hellgate: London.
But I suppose any game that has its own "Spinning Wheel of Death" issues is bound to fail. I have a couple of friends who wanted to play but were never able to connect. And at the time (around May of this year) there were hundreds if not thousands of threads on the forums from people with the same problems and never made it past the spinning wheel on multiplayer.
I love the /. posters (Score:2)
Reading the posts, you'd say that each and every one is a successful business[man|woman].
Well, guess what, until you try to develop a commercial product, you won't know how tricky it is, especially subscription-based.
For version-based products that ship in a box or are downloaded, you invest some money (yours or loaned), work and release Version 1.0. If it's successful enough (e.g. you get some profit), you gather feedback and use some of the profit to make version 2.
With subscription-based services, you ne
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"With subscription-based services, you need to guess: how many potential subscribers? what's the optimal fee to maximize profit? How many will cancel after one month?"
All those numbers can be estimated.
It costs a lot to start a business, and if you skimp on the actual product, your competitors will eat you for lunch.
Yes it's hard, yes it's expensive. But releasing a product worse then your competitors will cause you to fail, every time.
Luck has very little to do with it.
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Your point seems to be that running a business is hard. It is.
That's why a bunch of gamers/programmers need to hire someone who actually knows how to do it. Don't make excuses for them because they thought they didn't need to bother with those aspects and could just ride Blizzard's coat tails into super-stardom.
I bought and played Hellgate. It's a terrible game, plain and simple. I doubt even a savvy businesscritter could have made that turd into a success.
Either way you look at it, they engineered their
Don't blame me for Flagship's demise (Score:1)
I bought the HG:L CE + lifetime subscription.
I could never really get into the game though. Part of it was that I was busy with other stuff at the time, but part of it was just that the game didn't really draw me in like other games have.
I hope (Score:3, Insightful)
I so hope they release a patch so people can play multi-player with out them. Or even a stand alone server.
Not that I expect to play that much as I lost interest around level 20. Personally, they made the game require to much hardware for most my friends to buy it, and not being able to play LAN makes it less fun.
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That's the first criticism I've seen that jibes with my experience. I probably would have bought 2 more copies (for my wife and son's computers) if it could have run on either of them. I keep my system up to date, and even I had to go out and buy a second Gig of RAM to get it to run well.
If we could play together it would have gotten played more too. As it is I still play
Change of tune? (Score:1)
Almost the same story as the Troika Guys (Score:2)
Really, you can have some of the best designers or game writers in the industry, but if you ship products (let alone your flagship product) with significant game play issues and bugs, well guess what...you probably will not recover from the bad publicity, even if your next products are better.
These guys have a lot of talent, I just wish they could have planned things better.
One of the best games I've ever played (Score:1)
...really.
Playing Hellgate in Hardcore Elite mode (one life - when you're dead, you're dead. Lose all your stuff and start again) is one of the most intense gaming experiences you will ever have.
If you've never felt your heart pounding in your chest *before you've even seen the boss monster*. Or had your hands shaking and your palms are sweating after a particularly intense battle, you haven't really played it. I've walked away from the computer and been *scared* to continue playing...
The repetetive tileset
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Funny vid :)
I had fun... (Score:1)
playing Hellgate as a single player. I picked up a sniper and went to town with that guy. It was like a cross between Doom and Diablo for me and I really enjoyed that.
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The Sniper/Engineer were fairly enjoyable in the beta, playing like a fps. The other classes were near impossible for me to control properly though, as mouse look didn't work well for me.
Sexy CGI girls (Score:3, Insightful)
When I first read about Hellgate London, I saw the teaser trailers which had an interesting, dark, backs to the wall kind of story, and plenty of bad-ass sexy CGI girls shooting stuff.
The game, when I saw the youtube in-game shots, was just another shoot-em up, with nothing like the gritty details of the pre-rendered videos.
I don't know how many games I've seen that do this; use some trick to capture people's attention, but present nothing in the real game itself.
I contrast this with UT3, which, while having really good graphics, makes no pretences about being anything else than a shoot-em up, or with WoW (which I've never played) which has an open ended player controlled story, or with games like Warhammer, which has a massive background (if somewhat juvenile) backstory.
Translation: (Score:1)
You want a business model? (Score:1)