Flagship Studios closes doors

Hellgate: London and Mythos developer Flagship Studios has closed its doors and made all staff redundant.

Work came to an end on Saturday, according to Voodoo Extreme.

The specifics behind the decision are yet to be made clear, but fingers point toward Flagship trying to do too much, too quickly with Hellgate: London.

"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," "GLC", a former Ping0 (digital publisher of Hellgate) employee wrote on the Something Awful forums.

"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. 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."

The future of Hellgate: London is unknown. No one has taken over responsibility for the game, with the rights falling into the hands of US money firm Comerica.

Currently there is no option to unsubscribe from the online portion of the game, but apparently there will be no charges applied.

Mythos, on the other hand, will be picked up by Korean company HanbitSoft, which aims to develop the MMO internally.

The closure of Flagship Studios comes after programmer Guy Somberg talked on his blog about staff leaving their jobs in "droves" - a sentiment later covered up by developer bosses as "inaccurate".