Bill Roper on Flagship's Endgame

Finally, 1UP nails the Flagship founder for an interview about his side of the drama surrounding Hellgate: Explosion.

Part of the challenge was that when we originally came up with the concept of doing the game, the whole idea of continuing content was pretty amorphous. How that was going to happen, who pays for that — we all kind of assumed that would come out of the revenue. The subscription money we did get, we all poured directly into keeping the game online, keeping it up and running. But the development demands far outstripped the revenues. There just wasn’t a good contemplation early on of how that would work. It wasn’t like: This is the budget that comes in every month; we’ll do whatever we can do with that. We just said [that] development will get done out of the revenues, and whoever pays for development, they get paid back out of the revenues.

  • http://www.damnedvulpine.com/ J.

    Content is hard and expensive.

    You’d think if any producer would know that, it’d be Bill Roper.

  • JuJutsu

    If they’d only hired a grown-up somewhere along the way….

  • Baroo

    I was going to be shocked by such an admission of mismanagement by an MMO producer…

    But then I remembered, this is the industry where incredible creativity meets technical wizardry on a daily basis, while project and financial management hang out in the back parking lot on a 24/7 smoke break… if they were even bothered to be hired in the first place.

  • Makaze

    That’s because project and financial management are booooooring. Bottomless budgets (and therefore limitless dev time) are much more fun.

    It’s not limited to game development though. It effects software development in general to varying degrees since we insist on scheduling things the same way we schedule manufacturing, which by the way doesn’t work. You can’t say we’ve got X amount of stuff to do and it’s going to take Y amount of time since X changes throughout the project and Y is actually four times Y. Double because you suck at estimating and double again because of everything you didn’t think of.

  • Slyfeind

    it’s like if somebody says, “Hey, I made you a loan against your Ferrari, [and] now the loan’s due, so I want the Ferrari.” And I say, “Great, here’s a box of parts, because I didn’t actually finish building the car yet.”

    Heh. I think that’s funny. Kinda like on Creepshow where the guy wins the other guy’s wife, so the other guy gives away her SEVERED HEAD!

    I like how he’s very frank and open about this whole thing. Let’s read and learn a bit shall we?

  • http://bdadv.blogspot.com Bonedead

    I’m pretty sure amorphous is a type of gemstone in SWG…. just sayin…..

  • Dren

    So, they basically followed those basic lists we see posted all over the boards and blogs these days?

    1. Get financial backing.
    2. Produce a game.
    3. Profit!!!
    4. Use Profit to keep game viable.
    5. Mononah hats fo-everz!

  • Lee Quillen

    The one facet of this whole fiasco that still irks me is lack of communication with the actuall customers. You know… the ones that had been paying a fee and provided a service. Everything that has been communicated via these third party interviews could have and should have been comunicated to the actuall customers first. Sure, you’d have had people complain it wasn’t enough (or whatever), but that doesn’t excuse that it IS a responsibility as a provider of a service to communicate to your customers.

    To date, the flagship and Hellgate London Forums have relied on links to these off site publications to try and decipher what might or not be happening to their service. It’s one thing to rely on CS personnel (many whom are doing it for free at the moment), but it’s an entirely different thing to ignore the customer altogether when things aren’t going well.

    It isn’t hard to do, and if you don’t know how or are simply afraid… you go ahead and give your Community managers permission to be frank about what is happening via whatever method they are using (website, forums, email, etc).

    I’d like to be open minded about it, but I really don’t have any insight on why you would choose to go silent on your company website while being perfectly willing to do an interview with 1up. I feel bad for the man, I’m sure it’s very very tough right now… but I’d be very hesitant to touch anything he lead from here on out unless it was an off line boxed game.

    Anyone with insight outside of the “you don’t pay for them to communicate with you” variety I’d love to hear because communication is indeed something I look for when thinking about any service be it a game, vacation, or simple home utilities. What benefit does this provide them? (to date all I heard were implied legal constraints which contradicts interviews that are beginning to pop up).

  • Klaitu

    Woah, Wait..

    People read 1up?

  • http://www.damnedvulpine.com/ J.

    It’s better than Gamespot.

  • Iconic

    Moral of the story:

    Running a startup is hard. It’s especially hard when your immediate ambition is to be #1.

  • http://wowpanda.blogspot.com wowpanda

    I feel so sorry for him. He digged into his own 401k (and the money will be paid to developers, and 15% goes to taxes).

  • http://www.kwanzoo.com GeorgeR

    Yeah, this is a sad case. I mean Flagship had potential, but they just shot the moon, had they pulled back a tiny bit it would have been awesome.

  • Ratman_Tf

    Yaknow. It’s like a run on the bank. If you post any tiny tremor about company difficulties, next day Penny Arcade has a strip about the execs wearing burlap sacks begging for change on the street corner. And then the whole internet is abuzz about how you’re a gone goose. Next day the investors are calling wondering why they weren’t notified that the company had gone under…

    Now that the fat lady has sung, he’s free to speak about it.

  • Lee Quillen

    That puts his July post where he denied there were any problems ina perspective I can understand. My question really was why continue the silent treatment after the fat lady has sang. I completely respect focussing on taking care of your employees and investors…that’s a tough spot and quite a time sink.

    At a minimum, it would have been a nice show of respect for the customers (the normal not going to rake them over the coals for trying types) to at least link the interview on the website. Even easier, ask one of the existing CSR folks to link it in the announcements forum. As it was, it made the forums by fans reading the article and discussing it.

    I didn’t know, maybe I’m totally off base, but I want my information coming from the source. Rubs me wrong the same way as continueing to see Gods and Heroes Pre-Order boxes on the shelves weeks after the game was cancelled. Different issues, but still tweak that respect for your customers bone I guess I have.