APB To Close Mere Months After Launch 185
APB, the action MMO created by Realtime Worlds and launched at the end of June, will soon be closing its doors. The game was very expensive to make, and news of the studio's financial difficulties has been circulating in the wake of disappointing sales numbers and reviews. Today, less than three months after the servers went live, community officer Ben Bateman announced that service will be discontinued shortly. One of the developers said, "In every way APB was a dichotomy. I have witnessed the project alter from a fragile and delicate entity used to show the world the depth of our vision through to the sturdy beast we released to the public. There were the unusual errors and crashes which are to be expected, but it worked. Once in the hands of our community I have never seen something elicit such a polarization of people. It was dismissed as overhyped and broken or else taken to heart to be loved and cherished, buoyed on by a fanaticism I was proud to have played a part in bringing to the world."
Cheating was rampant (Score:5, Interesting)
I loved the game, but cheating was rampant from day 1. After a couple weeks, I couldn't tolerate it anymore, as it literally seemed that you HAD to cheat to complete your missions.
It was fun otherwise, and was looking forward to coming back to it in a year ( after they got the cheating under control ).
Re:Cheating was rampant (Score:5, Funny)
I think you're missing the deeper gameplay mechanics obviously secretly built-into a game based around a life of crime...
Re:Cheating was rampant (Score:4, Interesting)
And honestly, the weapons and cars are all that changed. At rank 1, you were robbing stores and stealing cars. At rank 500 you were robbing the same stores and stealing the same cars. The game failed because it was hollow gameplay.
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And honestly, the weapons and cars are all that changed. At rank 1, you were robbing stores and stealing cars. At rank 500 you were robbing the same stores and stealing the same cars. The game failed because it was hollow gameplay.
Next you'll tell me that Soulfire was just another Rusty Sword...
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Next you'll tell me that Soulfire was just another Rusty Sword...
The merchants paid more for the rusty sword. ;)
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Sounds like they out-flagshipped Flagship! Hellgate London had a wonderful bug at launch where you (sometimes) could see your party members. You could see their weapon fire and spell effects, but not the character itself, which made for some humorous gameplay.
Again?! (Score:5, Funny)
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HGL was your fault? Dammit, Boona. Keep your damn dirty hands off Star Wars: The Old Republic or so help me, I will lead a cadre of basement dwellers to your door with torches and pitchforks.
*This hyperbole is not intended to convey actual threat. Kindly do not prosecute.
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Any Star Wars themed MMO is so tainted by cultural memories of SWG that it's already cursed, even if Boona does stay away. (Sadly, I too have a HGL lifetime subscription).
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Do not mention SWG in the same breath as SWTOR again!!! Sony destroyed it... can't blame SWG for Sony's ineptitude.
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Please stay away from Hello Kitty online, pleeeease.
( I actually miss Tabula Rasa. :( )
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>
( I actually miss Tabula Rasa. :( )
Are you sick?
I miss HGL (Score:2)
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Hellgate is coming back.
I'm shocked (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'm shocked (Score:5, Informative)
Seems like it was a ridiculously mismanaged project, there's a good series of articles on a former employee's blog here: Where Realtime Worlds Went Wrong [wordpress.com]
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No, their entire marketing plan was to hide as much of the game as possible until release, and then ban everyone from reviewing it until a week after it came out [rockpapershotgun.com].
Oh, THAT game! Yeah, I'm not buying that game. That game could be about all the things I geek out about having sex with each other, and I wouldn't buy it if the publisher had so little faith in their product that they were trying to prevent people from talking about it.
Being ashamed of your product is never a good sell.
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all the things I geek out about having sex with each other
Curse your turn of phrase! I was baited into considering this scenario and things were going fine until I started thinking about the humanities... and the horror... PhDs who write treatises on economics, politics, and philosophy are NOT attractive. Ever.
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I'm pretty sure that having you don't have to look deeper than having 300 people working on one game as being the root cause. Games depends on quality, not quantity. An infinite number of code monkeys just produce an infinite amount of poop.
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The "polarization" mentioned in the summary was most likely a polarization between people that didn't want to see advertisements after they'd already paid for a game and people that don't mind having advertisements thr
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Agreed. The only APB I knew of was this one:
http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=6795 [arcade-museum.com]
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Sounds like a plan for success, providing you can find an audience of mental retards who can still actually turn on a computer.
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Sounds like a plan for success, providing you can find an audience of mental retards who can still actually turn on a computer.
Slashdot accepts advertising, why didn't they just try that?
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Incorrect sig (Score:2)
Point of note: Your quote is from Jed Babbin while he was on the show Hardball, not General Schwarzkopf
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Ahh first time I noticed. I'm obviously highly worked up about it :-p
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City of Heroes does this, at least as far as visual ads go, though they go out of their way to make them not seem too out of place in the world, and it can be opted-out of, for what it matters.
Woah, economics (Score:3, Interesting)
130,000 players, spending $28/month, that's about $48M/year gross revenues. If nobody could figure out how to buy that asset out of bankruptcy, spend a couple mil a year on servers and bandwidth, pay a few people to administer it and create ongoing content and turn a profit, that's baffling to me. There must be more to the story than that, like they simply were unhappy with the bids they were getting because they were valuing it based on crazy metrics, or the amount they spent to develop it in the first place. Weird.
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Well, obviously they have no obligation to stick around, but usually once that many people get sucked into a game, it takes a while for them to get sick of it and leave. But yes, I am completely aware that this isn't a magical perpetuity.
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salaries, rent, servers, electricity, etc
50 guys with an average cost of $100,000 per year is $50,000,000 per year. not everyone makes $100,000 per year in salary but when you figure in health benefits, taxes and other employee costs it's about right.
Woah, math (Score:5, Insightful)
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other than my bad math there is also cash flow. in finance classes i learned that it's easy for a fast growing company to run out of cash. revenue and profit is not always cash since you may get the cash months after the revenue is recognized. but in the mean time you have bills to pay that have to be paid in cash right now.
if they spent too much on developement and didn't have enough cash to cover their debt, salary and other costs while waiting for the cash to be paid that would do it
Re:Woah, economics (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think you lost a digit, it's probably 2,000K salaries
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On a side note, had they focused more on the game play and not their stupid character editor they might have survived. The character editor was probably the most poli
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*my ac post got downranked for some reason.. so logged in*..
I'm not sure where they got those figures, but they were dead wrong. At any given time the past two weeks, there were maybe 300 people on my server. And there were only 2 NA servers. So.. 600 people in the entire country playing.
Also, they had an in game way, to sell in game cash for RTW points which you used to pay for the game. So after buying the game I never put another cent into their pockets as I could sell a nights's worth of
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The RTW points selling means that somebody else put the money in, BTW. So you were actually generating them money.
MMOs (Score:3, Insightful)
And this is why making an MMO is just as risky as making an online shooter: The value of your game to other players is proportional to how many people play it. If you don't build a large player base quickly, the game will have no staying power, and will be abandoned quickly: It's boom or bust. Realtime just didn't make that great a game, so they went bust.
A pity: They went ahead and built a game nobody played, while the Crackdown franchise was handed to a team that built a sequel that was worse than the original in almost every way. I'd have much rather have a quality Crackdown 2 than the two games we ended up with.
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Whether or not the game has staying power, so many players out there now want the instant gratification. They'll burn through a game's content in a few days and expect the developers to create more overnight. I've watched this trend from Ultima Online in 1997 through present day with World of Warcraft. You have the "gimme now, I'm bored, I'm done" crowd and you have others that explore, achieve, socialize and flesh out the depth of the game. The double-edge swor
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I think WoW got it right with their 2 weeks or level 20 cap, for free. By level 20, you get to experience a couple of primary factors in the game, like pvp, different zones, dungeons, etc. and it was plenty of time to decide whether or not you'd enjoy leveling to max. Of course, it gave no insight into arena or raiding, but no one decides to start playing WoW and spend 100+ hours getting to max level just to do max level stuff. While that may be the main draw, I highly doubt there is anyone who would enjoy
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I agree with you but EVE-Online is still a tiny MMO and going for 6 years (i think?). The game is brutal but people who enjoy it really do become fanatical about it. The key to their success, imo, is they work within their budget and continually upgrade the game (for free). Soon we will see the first spin-off with Dust 514 that will create a console FPS being fed in-game money, weapons, and targets from the original mmo. They will be linked in a meaningful way. Though i'm mostly waiting for ambulation.
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Tiny by what measure? Peak play time on Sunday usually has 40-45k accounts logged in [eve-offline.net]. Sometimes as high as 55k.
Paid account is somewhere around 340k, which is quite decent. The 2nd qtr 2010 QEN [eveonline.com] (sorry, it's a PDF link) gives that hard number towards the bottom of page 8.
300k+ is pretty big in the MMO market. Tiny by WoW/Blizzard standards, but then what isn't?
APB == All Points Bulletin? (Score:4, Insightful)
(sidles over to the article)
TFA doesn't say WTF APB means either. Apollonius Christ. ROTF man I hate abbreviations (IMHO). LOL ;-)
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The actual name of the game is "APB".
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Wasn't that "Anti Pirate Bureau" ?
Just kidding...
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Aka "The police put out an APB on soandso".
It means all points bulletin, but the name of the game is APB, not all points bulletin.
It's cops and robbers man.
Realtime Worlds Points... (Score:3, Insightful)
Realtime Worlds Points are a virtual currency that you can buy, right here, for cash. You can spend these RTW Points on lots of cool stuff, including gametime. It costs 280 Points for a 20 hour chunk (which never expires), and just 400 Points gets you unlimited access for 30 days.
Guess that "never expires" part isn't entirely accurate now. Or, if it is, not useful.
Just for giggles I clicked on "Purchase 400 Points" and got a server error...
Adios APB!
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Guess that "never expires" part isn't entirely accurate now. Or, if it is, not useful.
The points didn't expire, the game did :).
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They're doing it wrong (Score:2)
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That's about 1000x harder than you present it. First off if people get bored early, they leave, and you go bankrupt. If the tools don't work to create content, you get bad press, and people don't play your game, and you go bankrupt. Free trials only work if there looks like a worthwhile world to explore, or you get thousands of people adding to your sever load, who don't pay you anything, and you go bankrupt. Simple frameworks are boring unless you are really good at building tools, and that's pretty ha
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User content is generally going to be crap. Unless you have a staff that can wade through it and pull out the 10% that isn't unbalanced, god-mode, stupid, non-canon, or simply crap.
There needs to be enough content there so that people have things to do, and preferably a decent selection of things to do. You need to appeal to a broad range (the PvP
The Original APB (Score:2)
No worries, you'll still have the orginal APB [wikipedia.org].
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I think I've heard this before (Score:2)
That's exactly what Hermann Göring said during the Nuremberg trials.
WTF? (Score:2)
Wow, if you try to go to the announcement [apb.com], you get directed to an apparently broken age verification page. At least, I can't figure out how to get past it to read their own announcement.
No wonder they're going out of business. :-P
Well this is stupid (Score:2)
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It exploded for the same reason that the iPhone did, it was the best polished MMO created by a developer with a large fanbase released just as everyone was getting broadband. What both Blizzard and Apple did right was appeal to the casual segments where everyone else was trying to attract the hardcore and lodged in their leading positions they get momentum by pure marketshare.
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It exploded for the same reason that the iPhone did, it was the best polished MMO created by a developer with a large fanbase
The iPhone is an MMO? Who knew? Hmmm... you may have a point if you consider the monthly fees to "play."
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Not true in the slightest. EVE, City of Heroes, Final Fantasy 11, Everquest 1 & 2...those are just the ones I can think of offhand. They all launched before WOW did and are doing just fine, nowhere near shutting down or going free.
Aside from the fact that Everquest 1 has been struggling with a declining player base for years, I take it you missed Everquest 2 going free to play?
Aggrandize much? (Score:3, Funny)
Full acountability (Score:4, Insightful)
why it failed (Score:2, Informative)
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Dont know what game you played, there is constantly people running around on the servers I play on.
I was addicted to this game, sure it had cheaters and some terrible missions, but the game was funt o play and I enjoyed beating the cheaters with a good team you could beat anyone.
It definitly needed to be tweeked and some new misisons and gameplay mechanics, but the game looked good, played very well, I had some of the best fire fights in a online game ever and I have been playing FPS games for a very long t
Open source it. and it will live. (Score:3, Insightful)
What some consider "marketing" (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know about all this so-called marketing. The first time I heard of APB was at PAX East back in February. They had 8 stations set up logged into the game. They had one emotionless, utterly uninterested guy talking about how awesome the game was, who occasionally threw a T-shirt into the huge crowd amassing around their booth. He would then taunt everyone else by saying "the best way to get a shirt is to play the game".
Except NO ONE GOT TO PLAY. Well, a couple of people did. They'd get about 5 minutes on the station, which was enough to walk around a little, and... find nobody else. Then, when they got off, the stations would be taken over by booth staffers, who would dick around with the stations for 15 minutes or so.
The best way to get people to play your game is to LET THEM PLAY IT. When a crowd of people are surrounding your booth, interested in playing a game that has no legacy to spur familiarity or loyalty, you should make sure they get to play it. Especially if it's as awesome as you say (hearing the music being played by people driving past, etc.). And you should provide a decent playzone or sandbox where they can actually do useful things instead of ooh and aah at your now-industry-standard graphics.
And for this they passed on Crackdown 2? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like greed and poor decision making has been rampant at Realtime since it started, with Crackdown they wanted a multi-game deal before the original ever shipped, then when MS was ready to deal on Crackdown 2 (2 months after launch) they passed and made it sound to the press like it was MS's fault for taking a wait and see approach saying MS was taking to long. When MS handed Crackdown 2 to Ruffian, Realtime expressed their unhappiness with MS not waiting until APB was done. Between the charging full price for a game that had no demo or trial, a monthly fee with additional in game purchases basically required to even be competitive and buggy as hell final product did anyone really think this game had a chance?
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Gamasutra [gamasutra.com] recently ran a story from an ex-employee that summed up how to not make an MMO.
"Fun never seemed to be a criterion for what they were doing; managers with little clipboards would go around and tick off things, saying 'OK that's done' and moving on. There was never any consideration for whether or not what had been done was any fun."
"to be expected" (Score:2)
One of the developers said
Well, "unusual" and "to be expected" seem to me to be at least somewhat contradictory.. (Though I suspect he means crashes due to some weird combination of hardware & OS they hadn't tested on.)
But still, such errors and crashes _shouldn't_ be expected.
Over 300 employees. WOW (Score:2)
Holy crud. 300 employees worked on that thing.
I worked a couple of MMOs that went flop before I got out of the industry. This has got to be a new record for simply the size of people working on it (MMOs, I mean, not game shops in general).
I worked on an MMO project that was released under Atari some years back and we had, what, 60 people max, with a considerable amount of them just being customer support goons.
Another project only had 30 people, and we published after two years. Granted, that company wen
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Likely not...such is the risk you run with playing an MMO.
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Now, with a little luck, the studio will open source the server software so someone can run it.
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The difference being that software, games, music, TV shows, and movies can continue working as long as you have the media (and a suitable device for using them.) With an MMO, once the servers are shut down the software and everything you paid for in the game are worthless.
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Even so, virtually all DRM schemes can be cracked. I mean, you can crack Steam games as far as that goes. The problem with MMOs is that being able to function at all depends entirely on the presence of those remote servers. All the cracking in the world doesn't do a damn bit of good unless someone has figured out how to setup an unauthorized server.
If I did have some kind of licensed media to which the authorizing server eventually went down, you better believe I'd head over to TPB or Demonoid to download a
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I know that there are private WoWarcraft servers up and running, albeit illegally.
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Jackass, have you always been a douche?
So, being aware that music comes in forms other than on pre-recorded media makes me a jackass and a douche? Are you not also aware that you can play a game of card or see a movie at the cinema without owning it in perpetuity?
Do you have a problem with facts and logic?
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Does the ticket contain the concert? No, it lets you in the door. When you go to a concert, what media actually holds the concert - where's the container? Keys are not the car. I'm with mh1997.
But that post was in a reply to a post mentioning all music. Why isn't live music performance included under "all music"? That's a very limited definition of music.
Going further up the thread, it was initiated by somebody saying it was "foolish" to buy virtual property. So, by this logic, someone must be a fool to buy a ticket to a concert rather than a recording of the concert? Someone must be a fool to buy a copyright to a valuable recording? To rent a house? To pay for internet access?
I'm sorry, the noti
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Presumably if they had money to provide refunds they wouldn't be shutting their doors.
If you bought it recently (like the last week or so) you should probably be able to return it to a retailer, if you bought it in early august or back in july, well, some games are short 8-20 hour affairs even at full price. This happens to be one of them.
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A nice chunk of change for an individual ... but there are multiple costs that have to be addressed (servers, development, PR, marketing, etc...), salaries to be paid (code monkeys still get a paycheck, CEO's demand high wages), and probably investors that are demanding a return.
To be honest, $3.64M per month just doesn't seem like enough.
(Oh, and taxes, let's not forget those)
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registered users don't necessarily mean 'paying users'. A common industry trick I'm afraid. We're registered users on /., but we don't pay them after all.
The other thing is even if they were all paying users. Say you're 25 or 30 million bucks in debt for having made the game, set up servers, marketting etc. (maybe more maybe less but it's a good number for an MMO), at say 130k copies they made maybe 3 million back, because retailers etc. take a lot of your costs. Even if they made 6 million they're stil
Interest. (Score:2)
Let's say that 100 million was borrowed at 10%.
You need to come up with more than ten million per year just to stay on top of the interest payments. (Keeping in mind that interest is added to the total debt and racks up its own interest.)
Also keep in mind that the 3.64 million per month is gross. Not net.
Sounds like a sinking ship to me. To turn it around would cost millions more in advertising, and frankly, that's not a for-sure thing.
But hey, it's probably a big, happy tax write-off for somebody and al
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Shit. You're right. I need to get my credit cards re-evaluated.
-FL
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I betaed APB, That was enough to prove to me their were issues no one seemed to address...
Like cheating. Cheating was huge, people that couldn't be taken down and could shoot through other objects were fairly common. When I was in the zone I could give people way out of my league a run for their money, but unkillable people wielding miniguns with sniper accuracy is silly. I'm not quite sure how the cheaters could even enjoy themselves...
On the other hand, some of the work behind the game made fun highly cus
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I got the joke even if no-one else did. I'd mod you up if I had mod points.