In January 2008, San Francisco based P2 Entertainment announced that they were cancelling their Star Trek Online project after almost four years in development.
This news brought about speculation throughout the entire community with regards to the circumstances surrounding P2 Entertainment's cancellation of Star Trek Online and the subsequent closure of the company.
Accusations of money swindling and fraud have been common place, with some people claiming that P2 never even produced more than basic renders and screenshots.
Hailing Frequency has been working very hard to investigate these claims, and we are happy to say that we have been unable to uncover the true chain of events that led to the closure of Star Trek Online.
Until a week before closure, development on Star Trek Online was progressing extremely well, and according to our sources both inside and outside of the former development team, the game was within two months of a closed beta in December 2007.
P2 Entertainment had, for a long time, had a signed publisher for Star Trek Online. Until now, this publisher has been unknown to the community; however we are now able to reveal that it was South Korea based NCSoft.
NCSoft have, as of late, been restructuring the internal workings of their company and have been refocusing allot of their efforts. Star Trek Online was not the only title to be hit by this restructuring - Several other NCSoft titles including Spacetime's Blackstar MMO project have been casualties of this restructure.
After loosing their publisher, P2 Entertainments investors understandably got cold feet about the future of the project, and instead of allowing a decent amount of time for P2 to seek out a new publisher - they allowed P2 Entertainment a mere seven days to find a new publisher.
The rest of the story plays out like a bad Hollywood Picture. P2 Entertainment were unable to find a new publisher in time, so their investors pulled out. With no money to continue development, P2 Entertainment had no choice but to close down the project, and subsequently, their entire company.
We can confirm that if NCSoft had not pulled out of Publishing Star Trek Online, we would all be signing up for a public beta right now.
Thankfully, P2 Entertainment was able to save the Star Trek Online intellectual property by selling it to another, as yet unannounced developer.
As always, Hailing Frequency has worked very hard to confirm and reconfirm the information that has been reported here, and we believe that it does represent the true chain of events.
Any further news on this story will be reported as and when it happens
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