Flagship Goes Belly-Up

1up reports that Flagship Studios has officially laid off its entire staff and closed its doors to operations.

While not exactly surprising, it's still sore news given so many former Diablo developers worked on the project. My instinct is that the game went wrong when they tried to get people to pay for a style of game they were accustomed to getting for free. Roper can defend his market scheme till the cows come home, but charging people $10 a month for not even a fraction of the content other games offer is asking for trouble. Or for people to not buy and play your game. Which seems to be what happened because Flagship looks dead and gone and there game wasn't even out for a whole year.

Just for giggles, I checked to see if I could still log into Hellgate: London. Apparently Flagship paid their light bill this month because the server was up and running and peeps were blissfully running around the station, seemingly unaware that the future of the game is very much in question.

That's what will be interesting to see in the coming weeks. Will HG: L get sold to another developer, one that can support the game and breath a new vision into it? Or will the plug get pulled entirely?

I hope it's the former because I really have fun playing this game.