With all the hype of big announcements, leaks and speculation it makes sense that it’s also a good time to slip in some bad news here and there. The company that was founded with a bunch of folks who created Warcraft 2, Diablo and Starcraft has been forced to shut down and send its employees home with 30 days of pay directly out of the pockets of its executives.

This news comes as little surprise when you realize that the studio’s main attraction, the Diablo-esque dungeon crawler Hellgate: London, was almost completely a failure on nearly every level. Personally, I really wanted to love this game and when it worked, I had a lot of fun with it. Unfortunately the game forced a BSOD on my computer every time I opened my inventory. That was frustrating enough to walk away from the game forget that I had it installed.

The fate of Hellgate: London and the highly anticipated free MMO Mythos are up in the air as the rights to those IPs are owned by a bank. We’ll have to wait and see what happens in the coming weeks.