According to Gamespy, Namco Bandai has issued a press release stating that they will shutdown the servers running Hellgate: London at the end of January 2009. It comes as a bit of a shock to me that Flagship Studios managed to do poorly considering a lot of their developers are ex-Blizzard. Unlike the more successful ArenaNet (creator of the Guild Wars series) who also have had their origins in Blizzard, Flagship Studios has succumbed to being closed down for good . Then again, was it really the developer's fault? Maybe it was a marketing problem - namely the subscription fee you needed to play a game that was mostly instanced? Who knows.
The MMORPG is a tough market to go for. Definitely lucrative if you can secure a decent market share, but MMORPG players tend to commit their time to only one game since you usually just don't have time to play anything else!
The MMORPG is a tough market to go for. Definitely lucrative if you can secure a decent market share, but MMORPG players tend to commit their time to only one game since you usually just don't have time to play anything else!
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