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Realtime Worlds in trouble?


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ORIGINAL STORY: Speculation is mounting that Scottish developer Realtime Worlds wants to sell on its MMO APB.

According to an unconfirmed report on VG247, Realtime made the entire team behind its recently announced social game Project: MyWorld redundant today.

As many as 60 are said to have been laid off.

Eurogamer has contacted Realtime Worlds for clarification.

In July Realtime announced it would restructure following the release of MMO APB.

Realtime said staff headcount would increase on APB in order to provide "total support", fresh content and aggressive marketing.

Indeed new "post-launch" positions on APB were advertised for.

Last month creative director Dave Jones defended APB following disappointing review scores, blaming them on "misconceptions" and "huge expectations".

UPDATE: A community officer called APBMonkey has posted on the European APB forum in response to the current rumour surrounding Realtime Worlds.

"As we've announced we had to restructure the company to make it so that we can focus totally on APB.

"APB is still going strong and we fully intend to support 100 per cent. In fact we have a cool announcement coming this afternoon, so keep your eyes peeled."

Shame, it sucks when people lose their jobs, but APB has been in trouble for ages.

Maybe the announcement later will be it's been bought by Rockstar after all?

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Wow, it's not looking good for these guys. :( Always sad to see game studios possibly go under. Maybe this should act as a lesson for studios with 1 hit game not to get too ambitious and try to make an MMO bankrupting themselves in the process?

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D E A D

Realtime Worlds, developer of ABP, has gone into administration – the first word coming earlier this afternoon from an employee via Twitter.

The news comes after 60 staff were made redundant at the troubled studio last week.

Speaking to Eurogamer this afternoon under condition of anonymity, a source close to the developer revealed that RTW CEO – and former Take 2 boss – Gary Dale flew into Scotland earlier today to break the bad news to staff.

The source added that the APB team has been "given until Friday to clear their desks" – mirroring the situation of those working on MyWorld last week. The US office in Boulder, Colorado is also believed to have been "stripped down of staff".

Senior management – including some already axed from the company last week – are understood to have been made aware of the move, and Dale's visit, via email yesterday.

Further employee chatter on Twitter this afternoon suggests moves are currently being touted to retain a core team of staff to support online game APB.

Eurogamer attempted to contact the studio for clarification, but was told initially by a representative: "All management are in a meeting – there's no-one you can speak to". We've just been called back and told to direct all enquiries to the administrator, Begbies Traynor Group - we'll update with more information when we have it.

Realtime Worlds was understood to be close to completing social networking project MyWorld, in addition to the recently launched online game APB. Both games will likely be sold on as part of the administration process.

Message alledgedly from an ex Realtime Worlds employee.

What a fucking mess. I’m ex-RTW.

An outcome like this wasn’t desired by anyone at RTW, but game development is a weird business. A game can play poorly right up until only a few months before release, for a variety of reasons – Crackdown was awful right up until a month or two before it came out (some would say awful afterwards, too, but I’m trying to make a point :). Knowing this, it can blind you to a game’s imperfections – or lead you to think it’s going to come right by release. You end up in this situation where you’re heads down working your ass off, not well able to critically assess your own product. APB itself only really came together technically relatively late in its development cycle (and it still obviously has problems), leaving too little time for content production and polish, and lacking any real quality in some of its core mechanics (shooting / driving). It’s not that the team was unaware of these huge issues, but a million little things conspire to prevent you from being able to do anything about them. It can seem difficult to comprehend, it certainly was for me before entering the industry – ‘How did those idiots get X wrong in game Y?’. No team sets out to ship something anything less than perfection, but projects can evolve in ways that no one seems to be in total control of. All that said, it was pretty clear to me that the game was going to get a kicking at review – the gap between expectation and the reality was huge. I wasn’t on the APB team, so I played it infrequently, during internal test days etc. I was genuinely shocked when I played the release candidate – I couldn’t believe Dave J would be willing to release this. All the issues that had driven me nuts about it were still there – the driving was poor (server-authoritative with no apparent client prediction, ergo horrendously lag intolerant), combat impact-less, and I found the performance of the game sub-par on what was a high-spec dev machine.

But the real killer, IMO, is the business model. This was out of the team’s hands. The game has issues, but I think if you separate the business model from the game itself, it holds up at least a little better. A large scale team based shooter, in big urban environments, with unprecedented customisation and some really cool, original features. The problem was that management looked at the revenue they wanted to generate and priced accordingly, failing to realise (or care) that there are literally a dozen top quality, subscription free team based shooters. Many of which, now, have progression and persistence of some sort – for free. The game would have been immeasurably better received it had simply been a boxed product, with paid-for in-game items, IMO. This may not have been possible, given what was spent on the game and the running costs, but the market is tough. You can’t simply charge what you feel like earning and hope the paying public will agree with your judgement of value. Many of us within RTW were extremely nervous at APB’s prospects long before launch, and with good reason, as it turns out.

They also failed spectacularly to manage expectations. When Dave J spoke out saying there would ‘not be a standard subscription model’, he unwittingly set expectations at ‘free to play’. When it’s announced that we’re essentially pay-per-hour, we get absolutely killed in the press, somewhat understandably. The game also announced far too early (though it kept being delayed), and had little to show but customisation for what seemed like years, largely because internally we (correctly) judged it to be the stand out part of the game. But we should have kept our powder dry. Our PR felt tired and dragged on and on, rather than building a short, sharp crescendo of excitement pre-release. We also went to beta far too early, wiser heads were ignored when it was pointed out that any kind of beta, even very early beta, might as well be public as far as generating word of mouth. The real purpose of beta is publicity, not bug fixing. We never took that lesson on board. We also made the error of not releasing fixes externally to many of the issues early beta testers were picking up, keeping the fixes on internal builds, I presume to lessen the load on QA. This simply meant that to early beta testers, it looked as though we were never bothering to fix the issues they found, when in fact, they were being fixed, simply being deployed back into beta very infrequently. This lesson was eventually learnt, but only after we’d pissed off a large number of early-adopters.

The sheer time spent and money it took to make APB is really a product of fairly directionless creative leadership. Certainly Dave J has great, strong, ambitious ideas for his games. But he’s a big believer in letting the details emerge along the way, rather than being planned out beyond even a rudimentary form. For most of the lifetime of APB, he was also CEO of the whole company, as well as Creative Director. His full attention was not there until it late in the day. This has ramifications for how long his projects run – many years, on average – and the associated cost. This, in turn, means that the business model options were constrained, conspiring to place APB in a really difficult position, commercially. Ultimately, it’s this pairing of a subscription model cost with free to play game play that really did for the game. And many of us saw it coming a mile off. I must admit I’m dismayed about the scale of the failure, however. Many of us thought APB might do OK at retail and sell a few hundred thousand, though struggle on ongoing revenue, and gradually carve a niche. But it absolutely tanked at retail I believe (though I’m not privvy to figures) I think due to the critical mauling it received. It never made the top 20 of the all format UK chart. It’s scraping along the bottom of the PC-only chart, a situation I’m assuming is replicated in its major markets. And being at the bottom of the PC-only chart is not where you want to be as a AAA budget game. God knows what the budget was, but when you account for the 150-odd staff and all the launch hardware and support, it was in the tens of millions of dollars.

MyWorld is an innocent bystander caught up in the demise of APB. Which is a real shame, because it is genuinely ground breaking, though not aimed at the traditional gamer audience. It was going great guns over the last year or so, coming on leaps and bounds, impressing everyone who saw it. MyWorld might as well have been a different company – there was very little staff overlap on the two projects, they worked under entirely different production methodologies, and because we were not the next in line for release we received very little attention from the execs (which was a good thing, to be honest). We knew that time was limited, and tried to encourage management to go the ‘google-style beta route – release a limited, but polished core feature set early, and iterate. What happens to it from here on out is not clear, but without the people who wrote it, the code isn’t worth a damn, so I can’t see the project being picked up. Management tried to get a publisher onboard to fund continued development, but the time scales involved meant that was always unlikely, despite some considerable interest from potential partners. God knows what will happen to it now the team are gone. Probably nothing. Years of my life were poured into that project, but it was a blast to make, and at least it was made public so I can point and say, “I helped make that”.

RTW tried something bold, and fucked it up. It tried to make what amounted to two MMOs at once, as well as self-publish. I have to hand it to Dave J. He’s ballsy. But in the end, we couldn’t do it, and I think the whole company will go under sooner rather than later. It’s a shame, too, as Dundee can’t absorb the level of game dev redundancies that are about to hit, which means the Dundee scene gets that little bit smaller. But that’s the price of failure, and we certainly failed. No excuses, really. We were well funded, hired some great engineers, designers and artists, and great QA guys. Ultimately, the senior management team must take responsibility. I think they had far too much focus on the company’s ‘strategic direction’ and not enough on day-to-day execution, which was where it really matters. And I think a huge part of the blame lies with Dave J, though I can’t emphasize enough how nice a man he is personally; ultimately APB has torpedoed the company, and it failed largely under his creative leadership. It has other issues (technical, for instance), but the design and the business plan are largely down to him and the board, and they are what have failed so irrevocably for the rest of us.

ExRTW

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  • 5 weeks later...

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/09/16/apbs-last-bulletin/

Perma-troubled MMO APB is preparing to see its last cop shoot its last robber. While bankrupted developer Realtime Worlds’ second project, the social game Project: My World looks to have been rescued by a mystery US firm that may or may not be headed up by former RTW bossmen, All Points Bulletin has not been granted a similar second wind. Its impending closure has just been officially announced.

Quoth the community officer:

APB has been a fantastic journey, but unfortunately that journey has come to a premature end. Today we are sad to announce that despite everyone’s best efforts to keep the service running; APB is coming to a close. It’s been a pleasure working on APB and with all its players. Together we were building an absolutely amazing game, and for that, we thank you. You guys are awesome!

From all of the Realtime World staff we thank you for your continued support.

The servers are still up, so join the party and say goodbye.

Following poor reviews and poor sales, it’s unsurprising. But it’s never a happy day to see an ambitious project that an awful lot of people poured their hearts and souls into be so cruelly crushed. Perhaps, given time, APB could have corrected a lot of its problems. Perhaps it couldn’t. It’s still sad news for its creators, and for those who did enjoy the game.

Best of luck to all those affected by this.

EDIT: I was going to add this to the Sunday Papers, but since it’s relevant now, Ex-RTW-er Luke Haliwell’s blog is going through a multi-stage post about how it all went wrong. It’s just fascinating reading. On a personal note, while I feel for the RTW-ers, I can’t help but think about the consumers. Has an MMO ever lasted this short? As in, less than 3 months? This strikes me as one that’s going to be pivotal in terms of how people view MMOs now. Even the life-time subs to Hellgate got over a year of playing.

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Realtime Worlds - the developer behind the original Crackdown - entered administration last month, leaving its current IPs hanging in the balance, sparking rumours of potential buyers circling the studio's still-warm carcass. With reportedly 300 parties interested in picking up the firm's IP, it has recently emerged that Gears of War and Unreal developer Epic Games could be making a last minute bid to take the reins on APB.

With speculation confirmed by administrator Begbies Traynor that "the plug is about to be pulled" on APB after RTW failed to find a buyer for the IP, Epic could offer the game a lifeline and (whisper it) possibly increase the possibility of the sandbox title coming to Xbox 360. But that's just our own speculation though.

Realtime Worlds has ceased selling APB and the in-game 'RTW Points' currency on its official website, although patches continue to be issued for the game. APB currently has 130,000 registered players that spend an average of $28 a month on the game, which could make an acquisition of APB a fairly canny move for Epic.

With Realtime Worlds' Dave Jones a close friend of Epic Founder & Vice President, Mark Rein, it looks likely that Jones could continue work on APB (and possibly new project MyWorld) under the Epic Games umbrella, if recent rumours are to be believed.

"Mark (Rein) absolutely loves the game, everyone loves what they saw," Epic's Dana Cowley told the BBC. "We've got our hands full on Gears of War 3, Bulletstorm and the recently announced (iPad/iPhone game) Project Sword. If any talks like that are going on, then they would be confidential."

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