10 Video Games That Killed Companies

Flagship Studios was a small company created by ex-blizzard creatives who created the Diablo, Starcraft and Warcraft series of games. After working together since 1993 they resigned from Blizzard during the dispute with Vivendi in the early 2000s.

After leaving Blizzard, their first focus was on a dark fantasy action RPG with a title announcement via an exclusive interview with PC Gamer. The game was originally released in 2007 and, thanks to backing from Comerica Bank, regular updates and content were developed and released in coming years. However, Hellgate: London wasn’t very good. Critics were very lukewarm to the game at the time and many gamers were disappointed with it paled in comparison to the Diablo games. Players eventually dropped out of the game, unwilling to shell out a subscription service for such a bland experience from such prestigious game developers.

As a result, Flagship Studios had to file for bankruptcy in 2008 and all of its intellectual property was seized as collateral by Comerica Bank, including the next game that Flagship were working on at the time: Mythos. The game was turned over to Namco Bandai who kept the servers running until 2009 before taking them offline altogether.