Interview Releasing a shoddy game didn't work for Hellgate: London

[DarkUnderlord]

Tags: Hellgate: London

<a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=19966">GamaSutra have explored why Hellgate: London failed</a> and what lead to the closing of the development studio that made it:
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<blockquote>David DeMartini of co-publisher EA Partners has discussed the game's failure, saying EA had staff "actively working" on the title and suggesting that the game "lost the fanbase" by the time it improved sufficiently post-release.
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"It was strictly an issue of the gameplay and game quality needing to be higher at the start. Unfortunately, Flagship was in a situation where they weren't in a position to hold the game any longer, and the situation kind of took over."
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Finally, DeMartini offered a tribute to the creators at Flagship who labored long and hard on the project:
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"The guys who worked on it spent thousands of hours trying to make that concept work, and sometimes we just don't see something. Sometimes, we just didn't take enough time. Sometimes, things don't work out the way you expect."</blockquote>
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The motto of the story: Get it right the first time.

 

[Mefi]

The moral of the PR:' we didn't do it, no one saw us not doing it, you can't prove a thing and we got some nice IP out of it so it wasn't a total writeoff.', can be dragged out over a page.

Fixed.

 

[someone else]

I wonder how much they spent on advertising for this game.

 

[FrancoTAU]

Oh no, don't let VD read this. The Age of Decadence release will get pushed back another 3 months

 

[SimpleComplexity]

I don`t want to know how that game was born.

 

[LCJr.]

Didn't work for Troika either.

 

[obediah]

Finally, DeMartini offered a tribute to the creators at Flagship who labored long and hard on the project:

"The guys who worked on it spent thousands of hours trying to make that concept work, and sometimes we just don't see something. Sometimes, we just didn't take enough time. Sometimes, things don't work out the way you expect."

Fuck that, and fuck them. Releasing an incomplete, buggy, and awful shitfest because you're out of money isn't making the best of a bad situation - it's fucking fraud ( DISCLAIMER: IANAL).

 

[Lurkar]

Talk about trying to dodge the problem.

Maybe the failure had something to do with the money the company was literally burning on stupid shit like full gym memberships for employees (amongst many, many other stupid things), or that, instead of fixing the game, they decided to start working on a console version? How about the fact that they deliberately tried to back out of paying their debts and used their own game as collateral with banks to weasel out of it?

Flagship Studios did just about everything wrong. Everything. The only real criminal thing is that the douchebags at the top are still getting jobs.

 

[jasondragon]

Remember the badass cutscenes months before release? Then you play the game and (I only made it about 2 hours or so into the game, and this was months ago) the only cutscenes are book pages turning with no CGI movies to move along the story.

Meh.

 

[mondblut]

Well, they could always release an Enhanced Edition later? :D

 

[shihonage]

I sent Flagship an Email 2 weeks before release begging them to polish the game for another 6 months.

 

[Lemunde]

I bought HGL and liked it. It's a fun game if you don't take it seriously. Took them forever to fix the really bad bugs in it though and there's still a few left so it's unlikely they'll ever get fixed. I don't know. I find it really hard to agree with people when they say HGL is a bad game. Poorly executed maybe. Story's lackluster. From a financial standpoint it was a marketing nightmare. But I enjoyed the actual gameplay. Never really played online much which is probably where half the complaints come from.

I'm really more concerned about Mythos and whether or not it will ever get finished. That was actually shaping up to be a pretty good game, although it will likely be obsolete once D3 hits store shelves.

Well, they could always release an Enhanced Edition later? :D

Unlikely, unless someone else picks up the IP. Flagship isn't in a financial position to do anything with it anymore.

 

[DemonKing]

We thought it would have been slightly higher quality than it turned out to be, and I think the problem with the game was that by the time it got really good, we were four to six months post-release. That was too late; we'd lost the fanbase.

So why not delay the release for those extra 4-6 months in the first place? It's not like EA doesn't have some deep pockets.

Publishers defy belief sometimes. How many times do games have to get kicked out the door half-baked and fail miserably before they realise that delaying the release by a few months might actually make them money...

 

[Lemunde]

We thought it would have been slightly higher quality than it turned out to be, and I think the problem with the game was that by the time it got really good, we were four to six months post-release. That was too late; we'd lost the fanbase.

So why not delay the release for those extra 4-6 months in the first place? It's not like EA doesn't have some deep pockets.

Publishers defy belief sometimes. How many times do games have to get kicked out the door half-baked and fail miserably before they realise that delaying the release by a few months might actually make them money...

From what I understand EA didn't finance the game in any way. All the money FS got to make the game came from loans and collateral. That's why they're in the shape they're in.

 

[DefJam101]

God, if the Hellgate situation turned out this bad...

Imagine what will happen when Too Human is released!

 

[FrancoTAU]

The problem with them and other medium sized developers like Troika is that they have computer geeks doing the finance end of things. The problem when you have the finance geeks running things is that you get risk adverse bland games. Video game devs really need a different setup, something like Google or the Wall Street Journal structure.

 

[J1M]

The problem with them and other medium sized developers like Troika is that they have computer geeks doing the finance end of things. The problem when you have the finance geeks running things is that you get risk adverse bland games. Video game devs really need a different setup, something like Google or the Wall Street Journal structure.

Game companies need to be run like movie studios. There must be a concious effort to pump out shit to make lots of money while also attempting "art" projects. The problem is that in the game industry people get greedy and attempt to pump out double the shit games on 4 different platforms instead.

 

[LCJr.]

The problem with them and other medium sized developers like Troika is that they have computer geeks doing the finance end of things. The problem when you have the finance geeks running things is that you get risk adverse bland games. Video game devs really need a different setup, something like Google or the Wall Street Journal structure.

I've always thought the problem was the smaller and medium sized publishers like Troika trying to do business like they were a major development house. I dunno maybe the people that have been in the business for awhile get stuck in that mindset. They think they need to throw themselves at the mercy of the publishers and have offices and a large staff, etc.

Big Time Software(Battlefront.com) showed you could be successful without a publisher back in 2000 if you had a quality product. Pity Troika didn't try going that route. I for one would have like to seen what one of their games would have looked like when they decided it was finished not the publisher.

 

[Nicolai]

Has the Baron of Pepsi made any comments on the matter?

 

[Nightjed]

God, if the Hellgate situation turned out this bad...

Imagine what will happen when Too Human is released!

it has allready been released, even reviewers say its crap (its a shitty god-of-war clone with diablo elements that doesnt shine anywhere, as example of mediocrity one reviewer found the looooong, unskipeable, extremely common respawn animation to be incredible annoying), the developer however says that "gamers just dont get it" (probably because they are too human, hehe, actually he says that thing himself) and that "its soooooo innovative that we have put some people off." (read "innovative" as "generic")

here is the slashdot news items with links to the interviews, if you read them youll notice how he speaks about the game as it were a piece of art and the second, third and fourth coming of Jesus, jeez were do they find these douchebags ?