Flagship Studios Fallout Continues

While we don’t technically have an official statement yet about the company’s closure, Voodoo Extreme is listing numerous reasons why we can pretty much assume the worst.

Update: A Goon by the name of GLC, who claims to be a former Ping0 employee (thanks Hellgate Guru), said the following on the SA Forums:

Former Ping0 employee checking in here. I feel bad for some of the talented guys on the staff who busted rear end to try and get a game out on a ridiculous schedule, but I think we all kind of saw this coming after the game came out and basically bombed. 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. I didn’t always agree with the decisions of the leadership, but it doesn’t surprise me at all to hear that three of them (probably Roper and the Schaeffers) dug into their own pockets to pay people. Nothing about them, Max Schaeffer in particular, ever made me think they were less than standup guys.

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. They had their own server architecture, their own client, their own chat, their own graphics engine, their own everything basically. Plus they wanted a game that could support thousands of concurrent connections with no downtime, had an engaging single-player campaign, and could support an ongoing, persistent world. 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.

Plus you had Ping0 doing the back-end and multiplayer, working off a forked codebase, and trying to make sure that what they were designing was open enough that it could be marketed to other companies. And then Mythos, with a team working out of Seattle under Travis Baldtree (who is a loving genius, by the way), which had to fit into things somehow even though it wasn’t as much of a priority. It was just a really chaotic situation all around. Hopefully the talented guys I met there will bounce back quickly, it’s a lovely time to be unemployed in the bay area.

Update #2: Guy Somberg, Flagship’s final programmer and the Guy who wrote that infamous tirade, has modified his employment history on LinkedIn, which now reads as, “February 2005 July 2008 (3 years 6 months).” Thanks Flagshipped.

Update #3: Kotaku‘s closure story contains further confirmation from their own anonymous source.

Update #4: Amol Deshpande, Chris Schillinger, Jesse Jones and Ray Li all list their Flagship-Ping0 positions as having ended July 2008.

Update #5: Producer Patrick Harris is no longer employed by Flagship.

Update #6: Eric Liu is no longer in the employ of Flagship-Ping0. Having served for seven months as a QA Manager and Automation Engineer, he was promoted in October 2007 to International Producer, a position he held until the studio’s closure.

Update #7: Flagship-Ping0’s IT Manager, Brent Shinn, is the latest staffer to officially leave the firm’s employ.

Update #8: Grant Watters, Greg Brown and Jonathan McEvoy are the latest Flagship-Ping0 employees to have listed their positions as previous experience on LinkedIn.

Update #9: Flagship-Ping0’s Project Manager, Jack Wood, is now also an ex-employee. Jack had many important responsibilities, including: stakeholder, investor and regional distributor liaising; final say on all patch and product launches; and oversight of day-to-day end user support.

Update #10: Lead Graphics Engineer, Chris Lambert, is the latest to go. Chris was with the company for four years.

Update #11: As Flagshipped notes, it has been over 36 hours since the option to unsubscribe from Hellgate: London was removed.

Update #12: Hellgate Guru believes that the ‘GLC’ referenced in our initial update is in fact Kalan Kier, Ping0’s QA Manager.

Update #13: Off-site forum moderator, Diane Migliaccio, claims that Hellgate players won’t be charged even if they are unable to unsubscribe due to the feature’s removal from account pages. Coincidentally, Diane publicly launched her own community support company the day after Flagship’s closure made headlines.

On the official Hellgate forum, Diane is locking all complaint posts and subsequently pointing disgruntled customers to an at-present 400-page thread in which she allows spam and posts her own.

Update #14: Steve Goldstein, Flagship’s Director of Business Development and General Counsellor, is the latest to reveal his departure from the firm.

Update #15: Senior Sound Designer, Pam Aronoff, and IT Support guy Jon Lavigne are the fifteenth and sixteenth casualties.

Update #16: Flagship Web Engineer and former Hellgate Guru employee, Joshua Galvin, is the latest industry professional to no longer be in the employ of Bill Roper’s company.

Update #17: Associate Producer Matthew Jocelyn is number eighteen.

Update #18: Senior Systems Engineer Max Kalika, nineteen.

Update #19: HanbitSoft’s Korean Hellgate: London community portal states in a news release that the localised version of the game will be supported, and development will continue utilising their own internal team, regardless of Flagship’s fate. The story concludes with the local team expressing regret at Flagship’s closure, though they do clarify that this assumption is based on international media reports.

Update #20: HandbitSoft believe the intellectual property belongs to them.

Update #21: Ryan Valentin, a Junior 3D Artist Intern, is the twentieth loss, and a twenty-first employee has confirmed to us that he is also no longer in the company’s employ, though does not wish to be named.

Update #22: Brian Neal, Brent Lamb, Diane Migliaccio (aka Tiggs, the final forum mod) and Matt Tasker are the latest to confirm their departures from Flagship.

Update #23: Fired employees twenty-six through twenty-nine – Robert Donald, Bob Moseley, Brennan Plunkett, Sarah Daly.

Update #24: EU PR Manager, Chris Clarke, is now also listed as an ex-employee.