Aug 25 2008
Hellgate: London is an official failure. Why?
Flagship Studios is in its final death throes, and the post mortems and blame games are in full force. Recently some major players in the utter failure that is Hellgate: London finally spoke out. Of course, the interviews and statements were full of the usual weak excuses: players were not patient enough with us, evil internet people unfairly slammed the game, we were misunderstood, blah blah blah. The Electronic Arts mouthpiece was specially bad since he completely ignored the main reason the game failed: its completely idiotic subscription model.
First we have the words of EA’s David Demartini:
Why Hellgate: London failed, according to EA’s David DeMartini
Particularly absurd:
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.
Sorry, but no. Hellgate: London is still on the shelves. Legions of fans were following it just waiting (and hoping) for you to dump the idiotic subscription model. But you didn’t. So the fans stayed away. And now you are out of business instead. Great plan!
A little more honest, but still filled with a lot of weak excuses, is an interview with Flagship head honco Bill Roper: Bill Roper speaks out at last. At least he is willing to address the core problem, but not until page 6 of an 8 page interview:
GFW: At what point did you guys feel like maybe you shouldn’t have done the hybrid model? Was it before or after you launched Hellgate?
BR: Before we launched.
GFW: So you already knew…
BR: We knew before we launched. There was enough feedback from people where we realized, yeah, we probably made a mistake. But at that point…the train had left the station. We didn’t have enough initial content in there to [switch directions]. We might have been able to back off and go to a free-to-play-only model, but we didn’t have anything in place to roll right into doing an expansion. Everything from the development side to the business side was set to this model that we’d put together. We hoped that it was going to actually work, and we told ourselves that maybe it’ll work better than we think it’s going to work, right? But there was just a lot of confusion.
People were saying there’s going to be the haves and the have-nots. There was a lot of backlash against the model.
This is a crock. They easily could have changed. They could have dumped the subscription model completely, taken their plans and work for the first few “subscription only” updates, and bundled them into the first mini-expansion. Or heck, sales would have been so much higher without the brain dead subscription idea that you probably would have sold well enough to not even need to worry about an expansion in the first year (like Guild Wars).
It irritates me when game developers shovel out BS like this, because all it does is perpetuate the same mistakes and excuses. He also at one point blamed PC gaming in general for 2007 being a “terrible year.” Recent statistics have shown that to be false once online sales (via Steam and other distribution networks) are factored in.
It really is a shame because I love action RPGs. I really dislike the fact that gaming media barely challenges such weak excuses. But I guess that’s why I am finally making an effort to blog and write articles. If you all keep reading, maybe we can make an impact.
A group of friends and myself bought Hellgate London for a gaming weekend. This is the optimal conditions and even though we did have some fun the game failed. It wasn’t the subscription that bugged us… it was the bugs that bugged us.
One more game that was in early beta conditions when released. Crashing game, obvious lacks in the content and failing balance are the sure signs of a game that has been released too early.
I only played within the first month of release, so I have no idea if the game got better as stated in the quote.
You mention it in this article, but could you go into greater depth about the Guild Wars pay-system? I haven’t played it but as I understand it is effectively.
1. Buy it
2. Play it.
3. Want more?
4. Buy more.
5. Play more.
What are your thoughts on systems OTHER THAN the subscription model, which has been torn a couple of new assholes by your blog already. Your thoughts on that are probably worthy of a blog entry all of their own, rather than just a comment response.
I don’t believe much developers, like to put out a game they know are bug heavy, but if you have a deal and the timeline slides, or if you are on your own but the money run out then you can’t have that luxury.
Not only is Diablo 2 still sold pretty much everywhere, it’s actually still number 6 on the pc sales charts.
http://kotaku.com/5039175/npds-pc-sales-charts-august-3+9
Thanks for the clarification on the source of that initial image, Cambios. I was sitting there thinking “Damn, how much additional subscription content would I be up for to get THAT cutscene?!”
Hellgate also failed in the simple fact that it wasn’t that good. You had a maximum of perhaps six repeating environments over a game spanning dozens of interlinking dungeons. Clearly not enough for a game trying to compete on the MMO stage.
(The interlinking zone idea was a good one but one which was woefuly misconceptualized, especially since hostile mobs automatically respawned once you zoned, I can picture the shudderingly massive ‘train to zone’ wipes a group would suffer as a HL went treasure room hunting.)
It also seemed that the developers were hopelessly incapable of breaking out of the diablo mindset. The whole game felt like a diablo 2 Total Conversion. A very poor thing considering the summoner class had absolutely NO pet control, and was literally forced to chase it’s agressive pet through a level. I deleted my summoner class after the first few levels, dismissing it as unplayable.
I’ll leave my gripes with the Single Player campaign out, as they’ve no doubt already been experienced by anyone who felt they could enjoy decent replay value without subscribing.
Hey Michael, maybe you could clarify a few things for an industry outsider like me…Sos I knows whos to blames.
Who funds the developer?
Does the publisher have any creative input/control?
Does the game get it’s ESRB rating based off of a report from the developer, or does the ESRB visit the studio during development and see the game in it’s entirety? Is censoring common in the industry?
When a game ships broken, and I’m going to send off a strongly worded letter, who should I send it to?
Cause with debacles like AoC and Hellgate being the focus of our talk here, I think it would be great if we came out of all this knowing who to be wary of. It’s like natural selection, but survival of the funnest.
Who funds the developer?
Those that aren’t self funded are funded by the publisher.
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Does the publisher have any creative input/control?
Sometimes, yes from what I understand. Firmly established developers like Blizzard or Rockstar are able to do whatever they want for the most part. A small studio under Electronic Arts for example though wouldn’t fair as well.
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Does the game get it’s ESRB rating based off of a report from the developer, or does the ESRB visit the studio during development and see the game in it’s entirety? Is censoring common in the industry?
From what I understand, the ESRB is given video footage of all the questionable content, and they rate the game according to that footage. To the best of my knowledge, they don’t actually play the games.
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When a game ships broken, and I’m going to send off a strongly worded letter, who should I send it to?
I’d generally send it to both the developer and the publisher. Though the developers are often rushed by the publisher to get a game out before they are ready, the publisher ultimately can’t make the fixes, only the developers can.
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I’m not in the industry, so the above may not be totally accurate. I do follow the development end of the industry though, so I think my answers are pretty accurate.