Hellgate ends with a whimper

Despite last hour grandstanding by Korean publisher, HanbitSoft, Hellgate: London closed its North American and European servers at midnight CST, February 1, 2009. The picture above is a screen shot taken by a player moments before the servers stopped service with an unknown network error.

I checked up  on the HellgateLondon.com site shortly after the servers officially shutdown and noticed that Bandai Namco had also shut down their forums. Requests to the Hellgate site and forums returned a DNS error. Some players held to hopes that an announcement from HanbitSoft was forthcoming that they were resuming service shortly. Alas, that announcement never came and for all their posturing, it appears that HanbitSoft was more bark than bite.

Read more about the last moments of Hellgate:London and player reactions at hellforge.gameriot.

Hellgate: London not dead yet

“It’s dead, Jim!”  Er, not quite. As reported in Gamasutra, HanbitSoft, the Korean publisher and developer will continue operation of Hellgate: London MMO beyond the January 31 announcement of its permanent closure. This announcement contradicts the previous announcement by Namco-Bandai that Hellgate servers would be shut down permanently. HanbitSoft also announced that Hellgate would remain a free-to-play game.

HanbitSoft asserts that it owns the intellectual property, engine and the source code for the troubled title and plans to release a major patch later this year.  Patch details are sketchy at this point, but HanbitSoft revealed they would address unifying the two playing modes, class imbalances and strengthen community features.

As an outside observer, I’m surprised at HanbitSoft’s apparent generosity in both keeping the servers alive and maintaining its free-to-play status. Running servers isn’t cheap, nor is the development of a new patch for a game that was basically dead. Would the introduction of some sort of microtransaction or non-subscription based economic model be in the works? I think this is highly likely. Whatever it is, HanbitSoft is taking a surprisingly long term view of this franchise. Still, you have to give them a lot of credit for not just cutting their losses and doing something to win the (at least, grudging) respect of their remaining players and possibly attracting new players with their boldness.

I wasn’t interested in this game before, but now I’ll probably give it a try.

EDIT: At the time of this writing, no announcement of HanbitSoft’s intentions were posted at the Hellgate: London site. Forum goers seem confused as to whether the announcement by HanbitSoft was legitimate as no official word has been given on the site.