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A Little Behind the Scenes Info about Flagship Studios, and why EA is not to blame
StillGray
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I noticed lately that on various forums, including Penny Arcade here, a lot of people have sought to blame Electronic Arts for the massive failure that is Hellgate: London. That being said, EA is not to blame, as EA wasn't even directly involved with the development.
The game's failure was entirely the fault of the company. EA Partners was simply there to provide Flagship Studios with the funds and means to publish the game. EA might be responsible for a great deal of bad in the gaming industry, but Hellgate: London is not one of their problems.
There's a wide belief that the reason Blizzard North split from Blizzard was due to a 'lack of creative control' and a rift between Blizzard North and the French bigwigs at VU. But as we can see with how Blizzard runs itself and maintains full autonomy, this belief, perpetrated by Bill Roper in an interview with GameSpot circa 2005 couldn't be farther from the truth.
A rift did indeed exist, but it was between Blizzard North and Blizzard itself. Creative differences? Perhaps. After all, they did go on to make a failed first person shooter with single player, free multiplayer and a completely redundant subscription with added "Founder's Fee" to rip off the most unsuspecting and most hard core of fans. Blizzard on the other hand went on to make and develop a kind of Diablo III that everyone wants to play; a game that'll be nothing short of a success. And based on the user feedback of everyone who played it at BlizzCon, we know that this statement is absolutely true.
Flagship Studios maintained its independence from EA, and apart from the recent battles that Bill Roper has had with the new owners of their Korean beneficiary, neither Namco nor EA had any say in how they ran things.
When the Koreans stepped in to make them 'tighten their belts', they decided lay everyone off instead of finishing what they'd started. Heck, some of those people who'd been laid off did not even receive COBRA insurance coverage because some of the management at Flagship hadn't bothered to set it up. I don't know if this is still true, months since they've been laid off, but it was definitely true in the weeks following the news of the lay-offs.
To cite some examples of the company's miserable failures that haven't been aforementioned on websites like Flagshipped and GamaSutra, there were certain times when QA and localization teams contracted by EA would submit a lot of bug reports and important gameplay feedback back to Flagship Studios for them to rectify. Most companies would comply, and even be grateful for such feedback, but not Flagship Studios, where such feedback was simply ignored. These same QA people tried to go through upper channels (e.g. EA management) to get those issues brought directly to the managers and the problems were simply dismissed by Flagship Studios.
At one point after Hellgate London's release, when it seemed that the game was still in a terribly buggy state and that Flagship Studios wasn't doing jack shit to fix it, EA contracted QABoss to provide professional feedback and actual technical suggestions to remedy the game's bugs, as well as its gameplay issues (e.g. gripes). QABoss took the initiative to contact leading community members as well as try to talk to people at Flagship, but nothing came of it. Flagship Studios simply dismissed it, and for some inexplicable reason distrusted the initiative.
Instead, Flagship Studios ran this completely useless program called the "Advocate" program, where certain users would be picked based on their enthusiasm and intelligence to remedy the game's problems by sending in comprehensive bug reports and other forms of feedback. Despite the work of these members of the community, none of their feedback was ever really implemented. These were the end days, and if they had even bothered to take the feedback in the first place, it was already too late.
Flagship had dropped the ball yet again.
Most of the reports and feedback that these people had sent had already been compiled by closed beta testers long before the game's release. They were compiled by Flagship's own Ping0 staff members, who were actually paid to do this job. They were compiled by EA contracted QA and localization personnel. They were compiled by Korean beta testers. In every single one of these instances, Flagship failed address the issues.
The CEO of Flagship Studios, Bill Roper, continued to pretend that the game was perfect and that people had 'too high expectations' (Ironically, expectations that he himself had built by constantly referring to the game as a culmination of World of Warcraft, Half Life 2 and Diablo 2) and that those complaining were simply a 'vocal minority' and could thus be ignored. Why, he even had the audacity to talk shit about Guild Wars, a game that's actually enjoyable and successful. How ironic that it was one of the last interviews he gave before the company more or less shut down.
So don't blame "those evil Koreans" who happened to lose all their money investing in the game, don't blame Namco, and last but not least, don't blame EA for everything that happened.
My two cents.
The game's failure was entirely the fault of the company. EA Partners was simply there to provide Flagship Studios with the funds and means to publish the game. EA might be responsible for a great deal of bad in the gaming industry, but Hellgate: London is not one of their problems.
There's a wide belief that the reason Blizzard North split from Blizzard was due to a 'lack of creative control' and a rift between Blizzard North and the French bigwigs at VU. But as we can see with how Blizzard runs itself and maintains full autonomy, this belief, perpetrated by Bill Roper in an interview with GameSpot circa 2005 couldn't be farther from the truth.
A rift did indeed exist, but it was between Blizzard North and Blizzard itself. Creative differences? Perhaps. After all, they did go on to make a failed first person shooter with single player, free multiplayer and a completely redundant subscription with added "Founder's Fee" to rip off the most unsuspecting and most hard core of fans. Blizzard on the other hand went on to make and develop a kind of Diablo III that everyone wants to play; a game that'll be nothing short of a success. And based on the user feedback of everyone who played it at BlizzCon, we know that this statement is absolutely true.
Flagship Studios maintained its independence from EA, and apart from the recent battles that Bill Roper has had with the new owners of their Korean beneficiary, neither Namco nor EA had any say in how they ran things.
When the Koreans stepped in to make them 'tighten their belts', they decided lay everyone off instead of finishing what they'd started. Heck, some of those people who'd been laid off did not even receive COBRA insurance coverage because some of the management at Flagship hadn't bothered to set it up. I don't know if this is still true, months since they've been laid off, but it was definitely true in the weeks following the news of the lay-offs.
To cite some examples of the company's miserable failures that haven't been aforementioned on websites like Flagshipped and GamaSutra, there were certain times when QA and localization teams contracted by EA would submit a lot of bug reports and important gameplay feedback back to Flagship Studios for them to rectify. Most companies would comply, and even be grateful for such feedback, but not Flagship Studios, where such feedback was simply ignored. These same QA people tried to go through upper channels (e.g. EA management) to get those issues brought directly to the managers and the problems were simply dismissed by Flagship Studios.
At one point after Hellgate London's release, when it seemed that the game was still in a terribly buggy state and that Flagship Studios wasn't doing jack shit to fix it, EA contracted QABoss to provide professional feedback and actual technical suggestions to remedy the game's bugs, as well as its gameplay issues (e.g. gripes). QABoss took the initiative to contact leading community members as well as try to talk to people at Flagship, but nothing came of it. Flagship Studios simply dismissed it, and for some inexplicable reason distrusted the initiative.
Instead, Flagship Studios ran this completely useless program called the "Advocate" program, where certain users would be picked based on their enthusiasm and intelligence to remedy the game's problems by sending in comprehensive bug reports and other forms of feedback. Despite the work of these members of the community, none of their feedback was ever really implemented. These were the end days, and if they had even bothered to take the feedback in the first place, it was already too late.
Flagship had dropped the ball yet again.
Most of the reports and feedback that these people had sent had already been compiled by closed beta testers long before the game's release. They were compiled by Flagship's own Ping0 staff members, who were actually paid to do this job. They were compiled by EA contracted QA and localization personnel. They were compiled by Korean beta testers. In every single one of these instances, Flagship failed address the issues.
The CEO of Flagship Studios, Bill Roper, continued to pretend that the game was perfect and that people had 'too high expectations' (Ironically, expectations that he himself had built by constantly referring to the game as a culmination of World of Warcraft, Half Life 2 and Diablo 2) and that those complaining were simply a 'vocal minority' and could thus be ignored. Why, he even had the audacity to talk shit about Guild Wars, a game that's actually enjoyable and successful. How ironic that it was one of the last interviews he gave before the company more or less shut down.
So don't blame "those evil Koreans" who happened to lose all their money investing in the game, don't blame Namco, and last but not least, don't blame EA for everything that happened.
My two cents.
StillGray on
0
Posts
I don't know why you choose to write this, but the seeking to apportion blame onto the studio after-the-fact is kinda pointless. If anything, EA is to blame by not exerting any pressure as a publisher. Why would they watch as this train wreck proceeded if they stood to lose as much from the failure as the studio (probably not quite as much) would through the eventual fallout.
By the way, where are you getting info? Is this an informed opinion or a much delayed rant?
Flagship's relationship with EA is an extremely convoluted one that involves Namco-Bandai, HanbitSoft, The9 and a lot of money. Namco-Bandai were the initial publishers, and they are contractually obligated to keep the servers online.
But to simplify, EA's role was to simply give Flagship Studios money, while handling logistics in distribution. Marketing, development and so on was handled entirely by Flagship Studios. EA would give them money to do whatever they needed to do.
I really don't know how much pressure they could've exerted on Flagship Studios especially after all the contracts had been signed and agreed upon.
To answer your question, it's an informed opinion. I founded (and still run) HellgateGuru. You might know me better as Sol Invictus. I wrote this up because I'd like for that information to be out there, and also because it's kinda interesting, especially if you're into Blizzard. Rob Pardo cited Hellgate as an example of a failed game in his interview with Joystiq earlier today, when asked about subscription based games.
Oh, no doubt. By the time they shut down, everyone felt that they'd deserved it. I've seen people on Digg.com blaming EA for it, though.
Hellforge: For all your Soulstone crushing needs! and Diablo III
I do, because the brilliant free Diablo clone Mythos bit the bullet in the carnage.
The company is gone. It's dead. Move on.
I was there. I worked for the Asian publisher of HGL. We had to deal with so much shit. They didn't even have a pipeline for patches. Most games have patch notes months in advance before announcements are made to the public aobut them.
Hellforge: For all your Soulstone crushing needs! and Diablo III
Is this the same Blizzcon where it was announced SC2 was going to have three seperate campaigns to buy? Cause people over at the SC thread are throwing a fit how that's ripping off unsuspecting and hard core fans. (Not saying that's actually the reality, but just how people can perceive things differently)
Is this the same Blizzcon where it was announced SC2 was going to have three seperate campaigns to buy? Cause people over at the SC thread are throwing a fit how that's ripping off unsuspecting and hard core fans. (Not saying that's actually the reality, but just how people can perceive things differently)[/QUOTE]
I think that a better way to interpret the SC3 "Trilogy" is to take it as a single game with two planned expansions being released within the year after and two years after the first game.
Hardly a rip-off. Dawn of War did it, and that game's campaign was atrociously short. SC2 plans for 25-30 missions per campaign.
Hellforge: For all your Soulstone crushing needs! and Diablo III
It's another thread trying to kill EA hate, which by the way, almost no longer exists.
If the president had any real power, he'd be able to live wherever the fuck he wanted.
Mythos was amazing and dosent deserve the hit it took because of this.
That was a really well written post, but it honestly sounds like heresay, do you have sources? I am not denying the fact that this is directly flagships fault, but there are times where its easy to blame EA for a buggy shipment since I think its felt that they had a history of pushing games out the door to get the money back.
Is there any new word on what will happen to either game? Last news was other companies got the games as collateral, and they planed on continuing hellgate and noone really knew for sure who had mythos, or what would happen with it since it was in "beta".
Oh Origin.
So you worked for the publisher of the game, AND run a fansite for the game that you published.
I dunno man, I do think there's some truth in what you're saying, but a lot of it also sounds like bitter damage control from someone who feels like they were somewhat remotely involved in what happened.
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It's OK, I'm sure we have plenty of other reasons to hate EA.
In that case Troika, Looking Glass and Ensemble deserve more time in the light then.
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Actually it turned out Ensemble didn't really die
they wanted to split off and weren't big enough/didn't have the money to keep their name
They're all forming a new studio and that studio will support Halo Wars post-release
Yeah, this is pretty much what I thought when I read the thread title...
Origin sucked.
Yeah, I said it. Some good games, some bad ones, horrible place to work according to firsthand accounts. 20/20 nostalgia-vision is working overtime on these boards lately.
Also, Crytek doesn't answer to EA. Same EA Partners relationship that Valve and now id have.
My only regret is that Mythos had to die with Flagship.
Digg is not the place to go for reasoned discourse.
GT: Tanky the Tank
Black: 1377 6749 7425
Also, Vivindi gives Blizzard more autonomy now; but from what I've heard, that big exxodus of WoW people a few years back was due directly to Vivindi mucking about (and apparently taking a huge cut of the wow profit, if the rumors are accurate)
GT: Tanky the Tank
Black: 1377 6749 7425
I really don't care how horrible it was to work there as long as they made good games o_O Maybe the employees should have stopped crying themselves to sleep at night and found different jobs.
Before. It actually got better after the EA takeover.
Origin is a prime example of why creative people shouldn't make business decisions.
What a terrible terrible game. Mythos was also really slapdash and utterly irrelevant when Diablo 3 was announced.
Yes, every older game is rendered obsolete upon release of a new game.
If you fail to understand why Mythos would be irrelevant when Diablo 3 was announced then I'm too lazy to explain it to you. One is a carbon copy of Diablo 2 and one is Diablo 3.
Believe whatever you want. I've talked to people who worked there during the takeover years. It was shit.