The laziest shell of a publisher.
When it comes to terrible MMO publishers, just the most egregiously incompetent group of lazy bottom feeders, I can’t think of a name that fits the description quite as good as Hanbitsoft. The last time I talked about Hanbitsoft it was to point out that this miserable shell of a company shut down Granado Espada, leaving the company with very little in the way of games still in live service. Before that it was the disgustingly lazy and incompetent re-release of Hellgate: London, a game that has not received a patch since December 2018 and still has deep performance issues.
Hanbitsoft does not and probably has never cared about the term “quality control” which is why their library is a graveyard of dead titles ruined by the incompetence and godawful management of none other than Hanbitsoft. But out of nowhere the company released an offline version of Mythos last month, an MMO that has been dead since 2014 when the game shut down after less than two years of operation thanks to its incompetent developer. Hanbitsoft.
So it should be no shock that this relaunch eight years down the line is of course deeply incompetent. How incompetent? Well it’s pretty obvious when you get into the starter area and see that Hanbitsoft did so little quality control and put so little effort in that the game is displaying Korean text on many of the quests.
Dumber than a second coat of paint, the management at Hanbitsoft is. Dumb, lazy, and careless. And not even particularly successful at it, because like the utterly failed relaunch of Hellgate and its VR version, this is going to sell like pre-chewed toilet paper. Over the last month Mythos has peaked at 15 players. 22 people have reviewed it. Taking Valve’s $100 and subsequent cut, the total value of Mythos’ reviews (assuming everyone bought it at $10 normal price) is $84. You could work a full shift at McDonald’s and make more money than that. That’s not even enough for a payout.
It does beg the question of why even bother. There’s no way this worthless relaunch of Mythos is going to pay off whatever meager sum you paid an employee to set up the new client version, assuming you paid the employee at all and it wasn’t done by unpaid intern labor. It doesn’t generate any particular good will toward Hanbitsoft and launching in this state is going to immediately kneecap the game’s chances of sales once people start blowing up the reviews.
Or does Hanbitsoft have a contract for showcasing extreme incompetence and it’s at its four year renewal?
Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.
MMO Fallout 