Namco Bandai has announced that they are closing the Hellgate: London servers as of January 31st, 2009. Until then, the game will be free to play for all who want to check out the demon slaying Massively Multiplayer Online game.
Hellgate: London was pretty much doomed since it’s release on Halloween last year. The game shipped with tons of crippling bugs and glitches, and had sky high expectations due in no small part to it’s development staff, which was full of ex-Blizzard people, many of whom worked on highly regarded Blizzard games including the Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo franchises.
Unfortunately for the game’s developer, Flagship Studios, the failure of the game commercially led directly to the company having to shut it’s doors. The servers were sold to Namco Bandai who has maintained them up to this point.
In January of this year, Flashship Studio’s founder Bill Roper (who was previously Blizzard North’s Vice President) told GameSpot: “Unfortunately, even the best and biggest MMOs launch with serious issues. Being able to basically sit and iterate on a game for over half a year isn’t something you can really sell to a publisher, or fans, to be honest.”
It’s sad to see a game like this fail. Simply because you know how much hard work, sweat and tears the developers put into a title such as Hellgate: London or Too Human, and it’s always sad to see the games crash and burn or simply when sales underperform. I wish the best to them though, I’m sure they still bring the gaming world more cool games in the future.
R.I.P. Hellgate: London and Flagship Studios.