What started out as a faint rumor seems to get more and more substance with every passing hour. Officially it's still a rumor, but it seems that the Flagship Studios hit an iceberg and are now sinking.

It all started the day before yesterday when the first sites reported that Flagship, the developer behind Hellgate London and the upcoming action-RPG Mythos, might be closing down. The rumor gained further substance when Korean based publisher and partner to Flagship Studios HanbitSoft announced they weren't taking over Flagship Studios (answering another rumor with that) but dropped the bomb that Flagship Studios refused additional financial aid and were going to close their doors as a result. As it stands now, HanbitSoft seem to receive the IP rights for Mythos (which they might want to keep alive and distribute in Korea; but who knows if we will ever see it released in any other region?) while the rights for Hellgate will go to the financial services company Comerica, based in Dallas. But what will a financial services company do with the franchise, if anything? It's really not the brightest future for the game that originally set sails to be a worthy sucessor to Diablo II.

An official statement to these developments from Flagship Studios is still missing, but yet another rumor states that Flagships' Community Manager Taylor Balbi talked about an internal meeting where employees were notified of the office being closed on Saturday and that three guys from the Studios Management put their own money on the line to provide at least 30 days of pay for all employees. Balbi himself rejects to have ever said something like this.

A first hint that Flagship wasn't doing too well was the blog-post from developer Guy Somberg about a month ago, who talked about how depressing work is at Flagship and how many people had already left. The post was soon deleted, but the news was out and Gamersglobal reported about it (1 2). When soon afterwards co-founders of Flagship insisted that the situation was in fact not anywhere as bad as Guy Somberg had put it, we already had the slight feeling that this was just something he had to say, but not really the whole truth.