Sorry if I am repeating... but it is new to me:
"HGG has picked up on an article from thisisgame.com, a Korean news site. I’ll just let it do the talking.

Bill Roper and Directors of Flagship Studios Bear Responsibility

- HanbitSoft making good progress in securing intellectual property rights for Hellgate: London
- HanbitSoft is preparing for a lawsuit against Bill Roper and the founding directors of Flagship Studios.

Last weekend, Flagship Studios announced that former employees were fired and HanbitSoft mentioned that all measures were proceeding as planned to the benefit of players (in Korea) to ensure that continued service of Hellgate: London would be seamless despite the current problems at its development studio. In addition, HanbitSoft holds the executives of Flagship Studios fully responsible for the incident towards the rights and interests of the users and stakeholders, including shareholders and other parties involved. HanbitSoft is considering taking strong legal action against Flagship Studios in order to take them to task for their responsibilities.

HanbitSoft does not expect to have any difficulty in securing the exclusive intellectual property rights related to Mythos. HanbitSoft is prepared to deal with Comerica bank in a local visit to them next week in order to secure and acquire the intellectual property rights of Hellgate: London. HanbitSoft believes that the game has nothing to do with the aforementioned bank as HanbitSoft already holds the rights to the game in Asia. HanbitSoft believes it has a strong possibility of acquiring the intellectual property of Hellgate: London in the United States and the rest of the world.

HanbitSoft stated that they will be devising a plan to continue work on the games with local (Korean) game developers in order to see the game through.

HanbitSoft’s CEO Kim Ki-Young stated, “Hellgate: London has a strong possibility of being ‘reborn’ into an excellent game with an outstanding product life,” he continued to say that “With more than 500 people at its disposal, both in-house and outsourced contracts who are veteran developers of every genre ranging from casual games to hardcore MMORPGs, we are ready to recreate Hellgate: London into an excellent game.”

He continued, “We don’t have to recruit existing developers, however if we could do so, we could shorten the time for analysis and developing for users. Although we are trying our best, since Flagship Studios doesn’t want to cooperate, we have no choice.”

According to HanbitSoft, they offered several methods and the means to keep Flagship alive in consideration of the users, but Flagship majorly lacked in effort. Hanbitsoft already has offered large amounts of investments but Flagship replied with ridiculous counter-offers and the negotiations went south. Even so, HanbitSoft continued to make investment offers which were all rejected, leading to the lay-offs of all of the Flagship employees.

HanbitSoft also stated, “Flagship not only lacked effort, but were only looking for personal gain. Firing all of the Flagship employees in order to protect the personal interests of its founding members only shows how selfish and irresponsible they are.”

Flagship Studios is an incorporated company. Hence if any problems occur within this company, it doesn’t affect the finances of any of Flagship Studios’ founders.

HanbitSoft said they are going to take legal proceedings as Flagship Studios is legally responsible for a serious breach of duty in not protecting their stockholder’s rights. The legal proceedings will be done against Flagship’s founders and management people for their intellectual property. HanbitSoft currently owns a 9.5% stake in Flagship Studios."

I hope Bill Roper goes bankrupt. Motherfucker deserves it even more if what this article says is true. How can someone ruin a company and a game in less than a goddamn year? You've got to be, like the article said, only looking for personal gain. Flagship deserves to be burned and thrown into hell, however, Hellgate doesn't...it was just a victim of their irresponsibility and greed for money. Apparently, not only Hanbitsoft offered them financial help, but Comerica and EA games also did. It's as if they wanted this to happen.
I've got 1 question tho: are the Korean developers good? The only "game" I've heard they ever made is Maplestory, which is a joke. It's the kind of game you give your 3 years old kid to play. So, are there any successful game in America made by the Korean industry?? I'd rest assured if there was at least 1 or 2 titles lol.
EDIT: What's kicking me in the nuts is: WHY in HELL would you sell your Intellectual Property into a deal??? I'm not really into this whole developers-bank deals, but is that really that common, to throw the only thing you have into a bargain, without no guarantees that people will actually like your game? IMO that's just DUMB!
EDIT2: Also, thanks for posting those news!!! Made me rest assured a little bit I'm sure if Koreans take control they'll make a good job, this would be a great chance for them to get a starting kick into the NA and EU gaming world! I hope they win and Bill Roper has to go live under a fucking bridge somewhere, because he deserves it.

This post was edited by Itadakimasu on Jul 17 2008 09:52am

i still think blizzard should pick it up. it would be like a kick right into bill ropers balls for leaving lol

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from official announcement forums

This post was edited by Guardian_Blade2 on Jul 17 2008 10:17am

That would be awesome for sure, some actual pros handling Hellgate would make my eyes wet (and my pants LOL). But if I'm not mistaken, the reason they left Blizzard North was because Blizzard denied a certain project they showed to Blizzard. And that project was Hellgate: London, so it would be very unlikely that Blizzard would pick up a project they denied in the first place. Although again: it would be SICK. Who knows, maybe Blizzard gets interested if the price is cheap, it definitely would be less than they would have used to make the game for scratch, that's for sure.

The article from the Koreans is just posturing for legal reasons I'm sure.

If Roper was only out for personal gain he wouldn't have gone into his own pocket to pay the severance for the people they laid off.

Likely they had a cash flow problem, and that triggered some legal goings on with the creditors.

Hopefully the IP will come out in the hands of someone who wants to make it work and not let it die.

blizzard would just pick it up and demolish it. on purpose to sya FUCK YOU BILL ROPER!

Maybe he did that because he'd get more money by doing it...I don't see how tho

hanbitsoft has made it clear they would like to take it over in the ASIA market....which does not include US or EU