Flagship Studios shuts down

Author: Joe Martin
Published: 14th July 2008

Flagship Studios, developer of Hellgate: London, has shut up shop it seems and made all staff redundant.

Flagship Studios, the developer behind EA's Hellgate: London has closed and made all staff redundant, it emerged on Saturday according to Voodoo Extreme.

The news, which wasn't entirely unexpected, comes shortly after news that morale was low at the company and that many developers were already leaving. The closure is thought to be linked to the poor performance and reaction to the company's main title, Hellgate: London.

"Flagship bit off way more than they could chew and made a lot of development and structural mistakes in how they went about things. They had a lot of big dreamers on staff, but not enough nitty-gritty people who knew how to get poo poo done. It sucks, but that's life I guess," "GLC", wrote a former employee of Ping0, the digital publisher of Hellgate: London on the SA forums.

"I think it's less that they aimed too high than that they tried to aim that high and do it quickly, and they didn't do anything the easy way. It was like picking everything that's hard to do in a game, and then putting it on a brand-new company (two of them, really) with people who hadn't worked together before."

There's currently no news on how this will affect subscribers of Hellgate: London. Nobody has formally taken responsibility of the game and the rights have fallen to US money firm Comerica, according to Eurogamer. There is currently no option to unsubscribe from the game either.

Flagship's other game, Mythos, is to be handled by Korean company HanbitSoft, which reportedly aims to handle the MMO internally.

Are you a fan of either game? Let us know what you think of the closure in the forums.