The dangers of selling yourself out to a traditional publisher

Publishers are pirates. Agreed. But at least they offer a service. They are more like insurence companies than anything else. They cost more than they are worth, but you don't want to go without one.

In the old days, before broadband became a commodity in most countries, that may have been true.

But now days, a developer can skip the publisher and go straight to Steam/Impulse.

Take for example Introversion Software. A small independent game studio that was on the brink of bankruptcy. They originally published through a traditional publisher (Strategy First). Strategy First squandered their money and ended up going bankrupt themselves. Much of the royalties that Introversion was supposed to get they didn't because of Strategy First's bankruptcy which means that they didn't get proper compensation for the box sales of the game.

Introversion later decided to release their games on Steam, independently. Now, they are turning in significant amounts of profit and have expanded their staff to the point where they can work on two games at once instead of just one. Instead of being a few gamers in a bedroom writing games and trying to get their hard-earned compensation from greedy publishers, they are now a thriving and ever-growing development studio all thanks to Steam and the freedom it gave them.

Everything that is wrong with gaming today is the result of old-school publishers like EA, Activision, Atari, Take Two and THQ. The cookie cutter formulas and shallow gameplay and the constant milking of well known IPs is their doing. The intrusive DRM is their doing. Games getting buggier and buggier and the concept of release now and patch later is their doing.

That is the reason so many of them are starting to prefer consoles to the PC. Consoles are a closed-platform where players give up their freedom to choose who and where they buy their games from. Consoles are a closed-platform where players give up their freedom to mod games and to create their own games.

The big publishers realize their days are numbered on the PC. Digital distribution allows game developers to completetly bypass them. No more middle man is required in order to be profitable at game development.

On consoles however, the publishers still have control. The only digital download source on the console is one sanctioned by the console maker. The barrier of entry for console game development is much higher. Unlike a PC, you can't just make a console game, you have to pay royalties and licensing fees. That's the reason console games are more expensive than their PC counterparts because it's a closed platform.

I say let them go over to consoles. PC Gaming is better off without companies like EA. The console will be the platform for shallows cookie-cutter releases designed to satiate the proles and the PC will be the platform where small and large game developers alike can release games the way they want, design games how they want and retain control over their own artistic creations with no publisher setting unreasonable deadlines or dumbing down/mainstreaming the game in pursuit of the almighty dollar.

This is great. As long as advertising programs like Impulse don't take over where publishers left off.

You don't know what you're talking about. EA had nothing to do with this, and Hanbitsoft was trying to give them money. Evidently it is preferable to destroy a company and throw everyone into unemployment rather than implement any type of constructive suggestions as to how to turn around a broken franchise.

The people who founded Flagship are idiots. Blizzard saw this early on and canned their sorry asses. They then convinced some poor suckers into investing, based mostly on the 'notD3' buzz. All the investors got for their money was a steaming pile of Hellgate.

I can only hope that these people stay far, far away from the gaming industry, and focus their talents on something that they are more suited to; like waiting tables and washing dishes.

I just learned about Flagship. It's a total shame. I enjoyed their games.

Hanbitsoft offered to buy them out, not to give them money. I know how business speak works.

And yes, the publishers are very much responsible. Why do you think the game was so buggy and unfinished upon release? It's because of impossible schedules set by EA. Why do you think there was a lack of new content and patches? Because EA refused to provide enough funding and FSS was forced to take out a loan from Comerica.

Your oversimplifying. People love to have something to point their fingers at. Not all publishers are evil, and even EA puts out some good games. Some publishers are bad, but that doesn't make them the root of all of PC gaming's problems.

There's an even better example involving Strategy First: Stardock's very own Galactic Civilization.

plz do some research, maybe there.

The really greedy ppl were Ropper and co. They invented this half arsed MMO concept. They wanted to be a Diablo 2.5 and force ppl to pay monthly for even simply features like shared stashes to enjoy the full game.
So they asked for money like they are a real MMO while saying everytime they were asked that HGL isnt a MMO and so its unfair to expect so much new content.
On the other side they also said they never wanted to create another Diablo while part of their marketing was the fact that they were the creators of D2 (Mythos is also getting marketed with that fact).
Then noone should forget how extremely buggy HGL was when it was released and that a lot of promised features were missing.
Flagship even admitted later that they were "too ambitious".




ya sure blame the publishers.
You cant make such general statements and in the end every game developer knows what he does when he works together with a game publisher.
Its also easy for us to say that publishers should give developers all the time they need but we arent the ones which would be responsible if a game ends in a financial disaster and ppl lose their jobs because of that.

In the end it seems like publishers are always the ones to be blamed if a game ends up being crap and if a game is great all thanks go the devs.
Ppl shouldnt forget that there are also enough publishers out there which know that its also in their interest to give the developers the needed time but there is always a limit to this (even Sins could have needed 2-4 months more to fix some things like balancing and the mp part).

In case of HGL... they had a lot of time, the game was already delayed several times and the alpha/beta testers warned them about the problems.
In the end they created a product which simply didnt have the quality and this cant be blamed on the publisher.

Keep in mind, this story is not yet official. There has been no official word from Flagship Studios regarding what has actually happened. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not denying the rumors that the place has shut down...I'm quite certain it has...but there has been no official word regarding the situation, so until then, it's all just hearsay.

LinkesAuge, it's rather foolish to believe that such a shoddy release came entirely at the fault of the developers. Look at Vanguard. The game was released early because the purse behind the developers had been snatched from them. There was no money left, so they released the game early.

I'm not saying that Flagship isn't to blame for Hellgate: London's subpar release or poor community support, but to believe that it was their intention from the get-go to release with so few necessary multiplayer features actually in the game is downright foolish.

HGL was never delayed due to Alpha/Beta comments. The game was given one release date for North America and it met that release date...despite the unpolished state of the product.

Mythos is not being marketed by the "made by Diablo 2 creators" fact, except by its fans, who are apparently ignorant of the design team, which is headed up by Fate-creator Travis Baldree, and a few other guys that worked with him at WildTangent. It's being marketed as a Free-to-Play MMORPG that is fun, with combat and gameplay very similar to the Diablo franchise.

Not that it matters, since once the official statement is released from Flagship Studios, Mythos will probably not see the light of day again...

Just out of curiosity, why does modding seem to be such a big deal to you? You talk as if consoles have commited some cardinal sin by not letting people mod their games, yet nothing ever seems to come from the console community (any of the three) complaining about not being able to mod. In fact, the only noise you ever hear from them is when someone DOES manage to mod a game, and then fire and brimstone erupts as the general community demands blood be spilled and heads to roll in order to make sure the mods are quickly and harshly dealt with.

Do you have any idea how much it costs to run a persistent world? Any at all?

Hellgate London is not like Diablo in that the entire world is persistent. Anytime you are playing online, you are playing through Flagship's servers and using their bandwidth. It's not like Diablo where the only think Blizzard's servers did was host the lobby and keep track of stats and items.

In Diablo, when you join a game, you cease going through Blizzard's servers. It's entirely peer-to-peer where you and the other player's in the game connect directly to each other. Only when you leave the game or the game is ended do your stats get uploaded to the server (and it's one of the reasons Diablo is so prone to cheating because the gameplay doesn't go through a central server cluster making it very hard to verify).

In Hellgate London, you are playing directly on Flagship's own servers at all times. They aren't hosting just a lobby, chatroom or stats tracker, they are hosting the entire game for everyone.

To even support 2000 players simultaneously, you'd need an OC-3 internet connection. An OC-3 is a fiber optic internet connection rated at 150mbps (before factoring in overhead which actually reduces the speed you see) both ways. It costs about $8000 to install and about $45,000 a month thereafter. And you'll want redundancy so you will probably have to throw in a second one, from a different provider.

And then there is the matter of distributing patches and game updates. An OC-3 would be wholly unsuitable for that which means you'd need to bump up to a higher level OC line which would cost 6 figures a month (while a game may only need 64kbps per person in order for a lag free experience, most people don't want to download a 500mb patch at that speed). And again, you'll also want redundancy.

Then there is the cost of hiring people to maintain and look over the servers 24/7/365. And the cost of hiring people to make nightly backups. And the cost of actually collocating those servers in a secure datacenter. And the cost of the servers themselves. We aren't talking about computers made from parts you can get off of NewEgg and throw together over the weekend, we are talking about things like SANs (essentially a big array of disks that instead of using SATA or IDE connects to the server using a network interface, usually over fiber for the high-end) which can again, parts and servers that can easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Don't forget that you have to purchase more than one server (you generally want a cluster of servers handling auth and accounts, a cluster for the DB and perhaps a cluster for the world). We are talking millions of dollars in servers alone.

And don't forget the network infrastructure either. Routers, switches. And again, I'm not talking about your 50 dollar crappy Linksys router which would be wholly unsuitable for any kind of serious use. We are talking about professional grade managed switches and routers which could easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Oh and then there is also the power bill. All those servers take up lots of power.

Oh and, multiply the above costs by two since we'll need another datacenter, another set of internet connections, another set of servers, another set of workers and another set of network infrastructure for Europe.

Simply put, Flagship could not afford to give away both a free online service and free content. They had to make money somehow to support the ongoing costs of running the servers. (Before you mention Guildwars, it's developed by ArenaNet which is a subsidiary of NCSoft, a billion-dollar company with plenty of initial capital to invest in such projects and you still have to pay for new content).

I saw above somewhere that concerning EA's game deadline policy they follow "release now, patch later." I would like to correct this. It should be, in EA's case, "release now, patch never."

Not so much. As I recall, only the towns/hubs in HGL are what you might call peristent. All of the actual play areas are random and instanced.

They are instanced. But you are still on Flagship's servers. When you go into an instance, it's just like an instance in an MMO. It's client-server.

On the otherhand, Diablo is peer-to-peer and gameplay does not go through Blizzard's servers.

Diablo II is server-based (for ladder games, at least, which is what anyone who's not there just to hack and cheat uses). From a technical standpoint, the major difference between D2 ladder and HGL is that the chat lobby is replaced with the towns (which do still balance player load across multiple instances).