Hellgate: London was heavily anticipated before its release, but it received mixed reviews and the developer Flagship Studios dissolved less than a year later. Former Flagship CEO Bill Roper says that much of this was due to the company’s reach exceeding its grasp.

“The biggest failure with Hellgate is we just tried to do too much,” Roper explained. “We were a single-player game, or you could go online and play for free. And there was also this hybrid subscription model that you could get into, and the game was coming out on the new Windows platform, and we were part of the Games for Windows program. We shipped in 17 languages, we had a very high-end graphics engine that we had built but at the same time we did low-poly versions of the game. I mean, the list just went on and on and on.”

Before Flagship, Roper was VP of Blizzard North and helped develop the Diablo series of games which Hellgate: London mirrors in several ways. Roper said that not having the long development time Blizzard afforded its developers hurt Hellgate in the end.

“I think that was where our ‘growing up Blizzard’ hurt us, right [laughs] Because at Blizzard you just go for it. Every time you swing, you swing for the fences,” said Roper. “A couple benefits we had there [at Blizzard,] we really didn’t have at Flagship — I mean, even Blizzard now, but at Blizzard 10 years ago — one, there was always support from Blizzard from the top-down, from the publishing-down. We’d go in there and say, ‘We need to take six more months. This is why. This is the benefit you will see from it,’ and you always had to justify it. There was always the support [at Blizzard] to say, ‘You know what? If that’s what you need to make this game great, then that’s what we’ll get for you. We’ll figure it out.'”

Ultimately, the publishing combo of Namco, HanbitSoft and EA put pressure on the start-up to release the game at retail. “It still eventually comes down to dollars and cents and time,” said Roper. “I mean, I think when Hellgate: London came out… we knew it needed another four to six months. The publishers knew it needed another four to six months. The publishers were like, ‘Hey, we’re invested. We’re in. We’re as in as we’re going to get.’ So, the game’s got to come out, right? You get to that point.”

Source: Gamasutra