8 page  interview

www.1up.com/do/feature

GFW: Who has the Hellgate IP right now?

BR: Right now, Comerica does. It's basically held by the bank. If Flagship could come up with the money to pay back the loan, it's ours again. But we don't have that money. We've been working with Comerica to provide them with anything and everything they've requested to be able to properly represent the IP, represent what's being held in escrow, and working with them to try to identify people that might be interested in that. Even if this means that we can't work on it anymore, which is pretty painful. You spend four years working on a game and then to not even be able to do anything with it -- it's pretty rough.

GFW: Does that only affect any further stuff that would be done with Hellgate, or does that include the game as it exists now?

BR: Both.

GFW: OK, because right now, isn't Namco involved...

BR: Well, Namco and EA are continuing to operate the game. But, for example, they can't do any development on it. They can't make new content.

GFW: So Comerica's control is the IP...

BR: IP, code, tech, and tools. So to be honest, if I personally had the money, I'd buy it back out. The technology and the toolset that we built is a really powerful platform for creating titles. That was really the goal of what we were going to be doing at Flagship. We were going to be using the tech and tools -- using the platform -- [and] creating games based off of that as our core moving forward.

Oh, boo hoo.

feel sorry for the lifetime sub people, this game didnt even last for a year.

Buggy from the first day til now...wow

What really pisses me off is that Roper admits they knew their concept was going to fail before the game went live and didn't do anything about it. What a crappy thing to say knowing that lifetime subscribers would read it.

I remember reading on the official forums around release, so many people were buying lifetime subs. Lesson learned i hope .

Hehe, I had the option to buy a lifetime subscription for this and Lord of the Rings Online.  I've seen several MMOs die in the past, and I knew that it's a huge risk to pay for a "lifetime" subscription.

Originally posted by BlueCadwal

Hehe, I had the option to buy a lifetime subscription for this and Lord of the Rings Online.  I've seen several MMOs die in the past, and I knew that it's a huge risk to pay for a "lifetime" subscription.

Except those who paid for the LotRO Lifetime sub are already playing in their free time now. So lifetime subs do indeed work and are a great value if they are for games made by real developers.

I have a feeling EA will pick it up in full, and buy it off Comerica, if they're actually able to do so. They love sitting on stuff, and they have shown great interest in the MMO/Online gaming scene as of late.

It's interesting in that the bank probably dosen't realize that theme holding the IP assets like that makes them depreciate in value.  They should at least allow them to continue working with the IP, under the understanding that they still retain all the rights.

I manage to complete the game and now it will be archive in my garage. At least Diablo 3 will arrive in some years.

dishonest people.

they knew game would fail [ you dont need an einstein to realize it ] and still they sold and marketed it cheating a loadcrap of ppl.

really sad.

the issue was they realized their payment method was probably not going to work, but by the time they did it was too late.

The lesson is this.

Any game that offers a "Lifetime subscription" For a ridiculously small sum of money compared to what one would spend on two years of a normal MMORPG knows it's going to fail long before that point is reached.

It's just a way to squeeze larger sums of cash out of unsuspecting hopefuls up front to save your own skin.
 

I just tried the single player demo of this game and what I saw of it wasn't bad, it was actually kind of fun. Any chance someone else will breathe life back into the online play?

i tried the beta and it was horrid. Nothing felt right - the controls were off, the environment felt wankish, and the gameplay was horrid. Music, animation, immersion also failed. I can't believe peole bought lifetime subs to this crapfest.

Sad to see it go away though since the dev apparently wanted to at least work to fix it - maybe one day someone will refine the idea....

I hope they continue running the server because i'll surely miss playing Hellgate.