EA To Publish Hellgate London

The long-awaited release of Hellgate London, from Flagship Studios, will be handled by Electronic Arts. The Escapist newsroom reports that EA will do sales, marketing, and distribution of the game, while Namco Bandai will handle toys, novels, comics, etc. From the article: "Future games in the series were not listed as part of the deal, despite Namco's tradition of partnering with EA for publishing software in Europe. In Asia, Flagship Studios inked deals with South Korean publisher and developer HanbitSoft to handle distribution and San Jose developer Online Game Services Inc. to assist in maintaining the online world." Future games? How about they release the first one before we start talking about sequels.

Meaning

[steveo777]

It will be released far too early. It will be very buggy, it won't really resemble what the creator intended, and it will have far too many sequels.

yep

[thejrwr]

this is kinda the same with God Of War, they where talking about GoW2 before the first was released, guess they think the game will do SOO well that they can make even more money off the game

Re:Meaning

[Anonymous Coward]

It's easy to say that EA "destroyed" those studios but the reality is much more complicated. And ugly. You could argue that EA didn't make enough hands-on management decisions and simply allowed those studios to burn money and run themselves into dead ends, and it'd be a good argument, because that's what happened. EA gave its purchased studios a lot of rope, and many of them hung themselves with it.

Re:Meaning

[Endo13]

EA did destroy "those studios". In the last 10 years or so, pretty much everything EA has released has been bug-ridden garbage. Studios that previously (before they published under EA) had excellent games followed up with trash under EA. And the games that EA themselves have developed recently are the worst of the lot. It's bad enough now that I won't even try their new games that would interest me if published by anyone else.

Relocation?

[KDR_11k]

I've seen US publishers force games to be "relocated" (i.e. have their setting moved) to some US city even when it makes no sense (fighting a Soviet occupation of New York instead of some country actually occupied by the SU?). Wouldn't surprise me to see this turned into Hellgate New York. Okay, the game may be a bit too far along for that, I guess they'll leave Hellgate New York, Hellgate Miami and Hellgate LA for the sequels.