Eurogamer has an interesting article with Flagship Studios' Max Schaefer. The article zeroes in on some of the mistakes made with Hellgate: London and on Flagship's upcoming free MMO, Mythos. Check out a bit of what Schaefer had to say:

Eurogamer: Is there stuff you've learned from the Hellgate launch you're going to be able to bring to bear on Mythos' development?

Max Schaefer: Oh yeah! [laughs]. If we made a mistake with Hellgate, it was trying to do too many things for too many people. We wanted a cutting edge graphics engine, we wanted multiple business models with subscriptions and free play, and single-player, we wanted to combine third-person play with first-person play, we wanted to do random 3D levels, and when you're starting with a brand new game studio with very limited budget and no existing technologies, that was probably biting off too much. We ended up rushing it to market and not keeping it in the oven long enough, just out of necessity.

We learned from that, and going forward as a studio, it's a new emphasis of ours to do things that are more efficient and better-planned, and smaller teams on smaller projects so we can get more ideas out there. With Mythos we're definitely taking our time, we're well within our budget and our means to make it. It's a little bit of a turning point for us - don't try to do everything for everybody. Just be more realistic about your design goals. Bring it back to nine tenths instead of ten tenths and things will go much sooner.

Eurogamer: At least you've only got one payment model here - free with optional micropayment items. How are you going to make these items appeal to people without granting them a major advantage over non-paying players?

Max Schaefer: We do make a reason for you to buy items, but we don't want it to be necessary to have them, nor will we take the fun out of finding items. So we're not going to sell the best sword or the best armour - we're probably not going to sell any swords or armour. What we're going to do instead is cosmetic things - funny hats and cool shirts, that sort of thing. We're going to provide service-orientated things like being able to buy bigger Stashes or shared Stashes among your accounts, but then for gameplay itself what we're going to sell to people is things like maps to dungeons that have more luck. So you'll get slightly better drops in that dungeon, and maybe 15 per cent more experience.

What's cool about that is you can bring your whole party there, but only one person has to buy that map, so you can have a bunch of people benefiting from the purchase of one guy. Part of the free and item sales model is that you have to benefit both the free players and the paying players at the same time. The map model is really good for that. You still have to go out and find your items - you still have to kill the monsters and complete the quest. We give you a little bit of a boost in doing it, in the item drops and the luck, and that's the sort of thing we want to concentrate on - indirectly benefiting your character.

The item sales rely on it being a compelling free experience, because the free players support the paid players, by providing the community, by providing the items that the paying player wants to buy from them. We expect there to be the majority of people who never buy anything, that's just generally the way it goes with these games.

Check out the rest of this very comprehensive article at Eurogamer, linked above.