One Hell of a Product Launch – HellGate London

For all the marketing folks out there, here is one way never to launch a product. Read on for the low-down on the fun and games. Not.

The product in question here is a computer game called HellGate London. It was a much anticipated product and had a rousing response to its launch. However, it did a few critical things wrong which has made it go from hero to dog in something less than a week!

– Product was extremely buggy (bugs are things that make the game hang, or interfere with the game play)
– Communications with the community was patchy
– There was no in-game communications (this is critical, especially for an online game)
– Action was taken with no consideration to user inputs

Many users felt that the company simply took their money under false pretense. This is really bad. Now, bear in mind that the game is indeed an excellent game. I think what happened was a mis-management of communications, customer service and worse of all, plain, lousy product management.

You can read a funny “review” of the situation here: When There Is No Room In Hellgate, The Dead Shall Inhabit The Bargain Bin

Unfortunately, you cannot view the ire of the gamers unless you can log into their forums. Both the US/Europe and the Asian forums are hot with irate gamers. Bearing in mind that this game is based on the incredibly successful “Diablo” franchise, it is really surprising. Yet, again, if you think about it, it is not that surprising. Ego, Arrogance and Greed. If not, there is no other explanation as to why a company so experienced and with such a strong history, can screw up a launch so badly.

With products and services, a launch should never take place before a product is ready to go. The skill here is to be able to tell the difference between a critical bug and a non-critical bug. When “management” takes over or “marketing” takes over the product management process, the fiasco of HellGate proportions happens. This is not the first, and I doubt if it will be the last. Another famous example would be the Tribes2 launch by Dynamics (now gone) where the “auto update” was defective and could not update itself at launch!

[tags]hellgate, bad service, poor marketing[/tags]