Dueling Publishers
It's old news that Hellgate: London kinda flopped, that developer Flagship Studios has disappeared in all but name, and that the game that was supposed to be kind of an "MMORPG Lite" thing has been scheduled to cease operations (shutting down Western servers) at the end of this month.

Enter the Korean publisher, Hanbitsoft, which has announced not only that the game will be "free to play" on their servers, but that they are coming out with a patch soon (developed by San Francisco - based developer Redbana U.S. Studio).

HanbitSoft maintains that it owns the IP rights to the game worldwide (including the engine and source code), and operational rights in Asia (excluding Japan). Namco Bandai & EA maintain U.S. and European publishing rights, and have been very quick to dismiss any rumors that there is a remote chance of U.S. servers becoming operational ever again. The game is dead and soon-to-be-buried as far as they are concerned.

Officially, HanbitSoft's updates and servers are for Asia only. Unofficially... well, they deliberately announced a press release about the new servers and updates during the final week of the U.S. and European servers... in English.

From the perspective of a casually interested outsider, it seems as though there's a bit of a war of words going on between the publishers. And I can't say I'm too surprised by HanbitSoft's position. They probably paid a good deal of money for this business opportunity. If I were them, I, too, would absolutely refuse to have my investment's success or failure dictated by a third party.

Why won't Namco Bandai and EA sell their rights to HanbitSoft, since they have obviously already declared things a loss and moved on? I would guess that this has been discussed, but for some reason no deal is pending. Maybe Hellgate: London was worth more to them as a tax writeoff than they'd get selling it to HanbitSoft.

Or maybe some kind of deal is pending. Or will be worked out once HanbitSoft has figured out a way to actually make money on their investment.

Or maybe HanbitSoft is taking advantage of the fact that it's a world economy, and that Western players WILL log into their Asian servers with the new, updated community services - which no doubt include additional ways of monetizing the free gaming experience. This could be a very tricky way to win some dollars, euros, and yen without having to pay for the publishing rights in those parts of the world.

Hey, if nobody ELSE is gonna be running a server next week...

I never bought or played Hellgate: London, as much as I am a fan of Bill Roper in principle. :) But I find this story to be pretty dang interesting from a games biz perspective. It'll be fascinating to see how things fall out.

Hellgate: London to Continue as Free-To-Play Title

Hellgate: London Official Update from HanbitSoft

More on Hellgate: London's EU / US / Asia complex worldwide rights issues

Labels: Biz, Mainstream Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 9:54 AM (Permalink)