Flagship Studios had promise. Unfortunately, greedy executives at companies like EA and Hanbitsoft didn't give them the time or money to properly develop the game Hellgate London.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".Screw traditional game publishers. They are little more than parasites that feed off of the artistic talent of game developers. They are the reason so many game developers with so much promise have folded.In this day and age, with digital distribution systems such as Steam and Impulse, there is no reason for a game developer to do business with them and to sell their soul and their work to them. Especially for a game that's mostly online anyways.ya sure blame the publishers. :oYou 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.
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).