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 ).
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.
Bad news... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:And what about the players.. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:And what about the players.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I know that there are private WoWarcraft servers up and running, albeit illegally.
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.
Re:Well this is stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:And for this they passed on Crackdown 2? (Score:2, Interesting)
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."