While the launch of Hellgate: London was a disaster in the West, the East seems to be eating up the game, as Flagship Studios today announced that it has become the most successful online video game launch in Korea of the past three years with over 1 million accounts registered within the first two weeks of its open beta test. It is also the first online game in over three years to use a monthly subscription business model.
Hellgate: London quickly rose to the ninth most played online game, fifth most popular RPG and most popular online beta game in country’s PC cafes. Additionally, upon release on February 22, the game achieved record sales in its first week of presales.
According to Korean tracking service Gametrics, Hellgate has been burning up the Asian charts like abyssal wildfire, racking up more than a million signed-up accounts since the beta launched over there on January 15th.
So if you read last Friday's impressions of Hellgate: London, you know that we were hoping to spend a little more time with the game before finally rendering our ultimate verdict. Well, after a few more days with the title, we're firmly convinced that our initial impressions weren't far off the mark.
HanbitSoft is the company responsible for distributing Blizzard games in Korea (including Starcraft which may as well be their national sport). Apparently Bill Roper sang a song for the audience, he's actually pretty good! Video
HanbitSoft is kicking off the Korean open beta of Hellgate: London this coming Friday, the 11th of January 2008, with a party!
Bill Roper, Eric Liu and Aletheia Simonson from Flagship Studios will be gracing the event at Melon Ax Hall in Korea.
For more details (If you can read Korean.), head on over to the Hellgate: London HanbitSoft website.
@brianpyne, You got negative bids because the article had already been posted earlier by someone else. If you take it down the negative bids will go away. This article was already posted, as well, by the way. If you take this one down you will keep your upbids. But you should take it down since it is a duplicate article. You can remove articles by going to "your submissions" and clicking on the "remove this article" link underneath the article.
Negative 4 bids on news of doctors using Wii to warm up for surgery? Let's see how interesting it is to you when your surgeon accidentally nicks your coronary artery because he hasn't been playing enough Mario.
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Quote: “Hellgate: London” now has more than 1 million active subscribers.
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Since we seem to measure WoW by subscriber numbers...does this mean we should be at well above 100 DKP here?