As we wrote about last week, Flagship Studios appears to be in a great, horrible mess. Apparently unable to sustain itself financially, both of Flagship Studios' games -- MMO's Mythos (unreleased), and Hellgate: London -- are looking like they will some day become property of Korean company HanbitSoft.
Although Flagship released a statement at the beginning of the week saying that they were still in operation, this isn't really saying all that much when they have (finally) admitted now that most of their staff has been laid-off, and now today, the community forums for Mythos and Hellgate are shutting down, as of tonight.
Unfortunately, the Mythos beta is going offline tonight as well. From TaylorBabli, Mythos developer: "Mythos was not the reason Flagship laid everyone off. We cannot afford to pay moderators and customer service people (like Tiggs and her Minions). In fact, we've all been on here doing this for free FYI. The forums are one of many faces of the company, and if it were left to the wolves it would become infested with spam and advertisements. We can't allow that, so the boards have to come down. The Mythos Team"
Judging from a recent story by Korean site thisisgame.com, HanbitSoft is putting together a big lawsuit against the founding staff members of Flagship Studios, most notably ex-Blizzard Bill Roper. Here is a quote from that story (translated) : "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."
So what does the future hold? Hopefully, it will not turn into a prolonged court case. Some might guess that although HanbitSoft has the resources to turn Hellgate: London into a more successful product, a long spell in court would kill any of the residual dwindling interest for the game. As for Mythos, things look bleaker: although it has the makings of a very good game, a new programming staff taking over from a team working on a closed beta just doesn't usually work out all that well.
The people probably most distraught about this entire situation are the people that paid $150 for the Founders deal (which gave them a 'life-time' subscription for a game that looks like it'll shutdown after only 9 months) and our poor, poor Japanese gamer friends. Hellgate: London only went on sale in Japan a couple of weeks ago -- undoubtedly, the thousands of Japanese gamers who bought Hellgate will be upset to know that the game went up for sale when the company behind it was fending off an inevitable collapse, and had little hope of supporting the product for any substantial amount of time. (It is possible to play the game in single player mode, but that version of the game is well overdue for more patching.)
For more information on this sad and tired subject follow this link.
