regardless, it's dead, seriously dead in the water. they should just see about releasing a new game and letting it go from there. everyone knows HGL is a terrible game and nobody is going to buy it. No matter how fixed up it is, the majority of people are not going to care and this $40k is not going to be earned back.

Couple of screen shots before HGL shut down. It is strange to see all the gamers standing around waiting . . .

Precisely. The only reason to buy this would be to make a new better game with the license. But I don't know if what they bought covered that, given that it's licensed from the comic of the same name.

Huh? Didn't they (or someone else) announced Hellgate: Tokyo a few months ago?

The graphics were quite good, i don't know what that's all about...
For me, the problem with the gameplay was that there just wasn't much motivation to keep playing, even with the loot collection. There were some pretty innovative guns that could be fun to use, but i always had better shooters to play and the game just didn't give you a clear reason to play another level.
That said, jaunting around in coop was kind of a blast actually. It was just good fun to mess around with friends. Hard to take the actual game seriously though.

And anyone wonders why the games industry is struggling with 'thinkers' like these guys involved in it.
"Hey, you know that game that failed? Let's put it back up so that it can crash and burn all over again!"

I'd like to be the fancy thinking economist for a while here and say it's all about the Long Tail. This new rehash of a shitty game will have microtransactions, right? There has to be ONE sucker out there who will buy stuff and they will make money.
Okay, more like one sucker, multiplied by a thousand.

According to this it won't be available in the US or Europe . . . beta should have launched on Dec 8th

Am I the only person thinking ... Thank god?

Noooo . . .. just saying . . .=)

I had some fun with HG:L. The guns were neat, though I hated the melee classes. The mage classes were sort of "meh" for me. The mechanics of it were rather interesting, and the gameplay actually kind of fun, but I always felt the classes and their abilities were hopelessly imbalanced, many being nearly useless. The story was stupid, stupid, stupid, awful, stupid. Ridiculously so. I stopped listening to the idiot NPCs at one point because, ugh, maybe only 1 or 2 were actually interesting.
It had some terrible, terrible DRM as well. Truly monstrous. How so? It was impossible to uninstall the game without the DVD in the drive. Seriously, the uninstaller would just freeze up indefinitely. And it never actually told you this, so you might never realize why. Luckily I figured that out before simply deleting its folder and hunting through the registry for leftovers... but a lot of people didn't.

That would be me. . . =) . . . after trying for a couple of weeks to get the game stable I gave up and tried to uninstall getting the resulting freeze. Seems I remember it froze even with the disk in the drive since I was trying to play when I decided I had enough and began the uninstall.
After several attempts, I did a manual uninstall. . . . which lead to my introduction to SecuROM putting null entries in the registry which prevented deletion of the entries or the files even if you used the SecuROM deletion tool. HGL was the first game I bought that I could not get to run properly and . . . no refunds of course.

Well, that article is somewhat older than the OP.
Dec 3 2009 vs. Jan 18, 2010
I enjoyed HL:G, but I didn't start playing it much until several months after it was released. Considering that they've probably got a more competent management now, I suspect bugs will be squashed more effectively, and additions will come more or less when they're supposed to.

Seriously, I must have missed the part where this was good news.

I posted the link in response to Catshade question "Huh? Didn't they (or someone else) announced Hellgate: Tokyo a few months ago? "
Really didn't consider whether it was good or bad news, thought it was a discussion about HGL so . . . I didn't consider it one way or the other. . . =)