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APB To Close Mere Months After Launch
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."
Will the players get refunds for money spent on a product they wont support?
Although for an MMO.. not running servers is worse than no support.
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 ).
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I was seriously looking to buy this today too. Finally, my laziness has paid off!
Hellgate London (with Founders), Tabula Rasa and now APB ...
The next time I purchase an MMO I'll let you guys know ahead of time so you know that it will fail.
I am so surprised they didn't make any money, mostly because I have never heard of "APB"... was their entire marketing plan built around word of mouth advertising?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.
130,000 registered users spending an average of $28/month is $3,640,000/month.
This doesn't work for them? Granted there are development costs and what not but that's a nice chunk of change.
Trolling is a art,
This is kind of sad, I was even planning on buying that game. Though with how many players they had playing its suprising that they are shutting down so soon.
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.
So will there ever be private servers? Maybe they could sell the rights to the game to another company that would keep it going. I was never really planning on playing this game but it is a bit disheartening to hear about how it'll be discontinued for all the people who are playing it.
(sidles over to the article)
TFA doesn't say WTF APB means either. Apollonius Christ. ROTF man I hate abbreviations (IMHO). LOL ;-)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
From the website:
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!
$100 million in development costs?!? A business plan that requires more than 130,000 registered users to succeed? They must be doing something wrong. Develop a simple, basic framework and go online with it as soon as possible, add more content later and keep adding on. Let users create their own content. Offer free trials to get people hooked. Granted, your development and support costs are probably going to run you $1 million a year regardless, but it looks to me like their business plan must have been wildly optimistic. Of course, one of the reasons I don't write my own MMO is I can't figure out how anyone can offer a good game at a decent price and still manage to be self-sustaining over several years. But really, if step 1 of your plan is "Spend $50 to $100 million on development", I can't imagine why anybody would sign off on that business plan.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I think you mean $5,000,000 per year, which is much less than the $48 million a year some have suggested they were pulling in.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Sure the development was cataclysmic and the business model fucked up, but this is bad news for us, players. The next CEO to dive in the MMO sea will be even less enclined to take some risks and come up with something original.
Maybe this will motivate game designers to make less MMO's and instead concentrate on making games which are actually fun to play.
And APB ... wasn't. Tried it out at PAX and the play wasn't terrible; It was just never clear why you were playing. If you wanted to play a FPS, you'd probably just have bought a FPS and used the XBox Live sub you already had.
I wonder how many times consumers will have to get burned before they stop buying MMOs.
No worries, you'll still have the orginal APB.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
That's exactly what Hermann Göring said during the Nuremberg trials.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I was amazed that they were asking £30 or more for a client and then expecting players to buy play time too. I could understand paying for time, but for the client too? I'm not going to blow £30 on a game that got such mediocre reviews. If there had been a free trial I would have given it a shot and then perhaps bought some hours. Expecting me to pay a relatively large sum up front for something that's use will expire without further expenditure seems a little, uh, hopeful.
Wow, if you try to go to the announcement, 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
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
On top of the rampant cheating there were severe problems just downloading the game, I had to resort to sneaker net to get half the game files from a friend because they always came in corrupted.
Massive stability issues too, I was playing with a few friends and we usually lost at least one person to disconnects per mission.
Finally there were massive balance issues. If you hadn't used the afk training exploit before they patched it a few days into operation you couldn't afford any of the player sold items (most 'uber' items were random rewards). It was nearly impossible to get rewards yourself because of all the cheating, and it seemed like half the opponents out there had maxed out weapons and HP buffs. If I was lucky I could find a PUG who were cheating an leach off of them... it was the only way not to get constantly curb stomped.
Only used half of my original purchase time.
I bought the game before it came out because what I read about it intrigued me. I saw gameplay footage and stuff and it looked awesome. So I bought it in preorder for $10 less and for some additional gametime. I was so happy that there was finally an MMO out there that didn't expire your gametime. I'm not a prolific player so I hated the idea of being charged $14/mo, every month, even if I didn't log in once. Since my school was starting, I decided I'd play a bit and leave the rest of the time till later. I'd played a few hours, had fun, shelved it, and was going to jump into it once again after I got my bearings in school and had a solid schedule.
That would have been in a few weeks. Well shit, now that it's shutting down, I lose $50, not having played it any more than a couple of hours, and the whole "gametime never expires" thing ended up being a farce. My gametime did expire. It was (ironically) almost five months since I've bought the game, so that's like paying $10/mo and not playing it. So in essence I won nothing, and a gaming company ran away with millions. Wonderful.
I wonder if it's actually this business model that killed it... this idea of, you don't have to pay a monthly fee, but instead you pay for gametime (or unlimited time for a monthly fee, which wouldn't be something that you'd do unless you're really into the game). Maybe it didn't make enough money? Maybe the investors realized it's better to lock people into paying a monthly fee than to paying for gametime which never expires? Maybe they never were able to address the rampant cheating that was going on (so I heard, but never experienced).
Whatever the reason, I'm very, very disappointed, and feel slightly cheated. I never did get to experience the game I paid for. I could have gotten more use out of the $50 had I burned it for heat.
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 all the programmers and creative people got paid, so it's just a bunch of bankers or venture capitalists who got burned. Anybody with that kind of cash isn't going to be homeless tomorrow, so no need for tears.
-FL
Point of note: Your quote is from Jed Babbin while he was on the show Hardball, not General Schwarzkopf
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
The developer's quote sounds like they were on a humanitarian mission to cure cancer or bring world peace. It was a game that failed. Games are expensive to produce. Movin' on...
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
At least they can't blame this one on piracy.
apb was hyped to be gta online. what we got was not a gta world it was not a open world only time you ever saw another player was when you did this missions or in the social area but never just walking/driving around the map. going pay to play in this market was also a frigging bad idea. so there was no committing random crimes no world of gangs messing with your day. pretty much everything they hyped this game to be was a lie.
if it is any good like you say, it will even prosper and become prominent.
Read radical news here
Was Max Bialystock a silent partner in this venture? If so, it appears he found a working vehicle for his plan.
Wait, this game was released in June!? I was looking forward to this game very badly, and I missed the release AND it's entire life cycle?
From what I know about the entertainment industry, the reason for failure is pretty obvious: rampant piracy! We really gotta crack down on all those..wait what? MMO? Damn, hope someone doesn't try to compare this to other recent failures due to piracy...
I alpha tested Hellgate London and closed beta tested Tabula Rasa... Makes me kind of sad they aren't around today. Got the collector's edition of HGL too. Came with a mini comic I believe. I loved HGL, still play the single offline mode. Don't know if I can get the Stone Henge patch for that though.
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
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.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
No trial?
50% of forum posts complain about desert eagles and nothing but headshots?
Only like 10 guns and the crap you earn is just customization?
Jesus Christ! You could have payed yourselves to burn the money and saved time.
Saints Row 2 is incredible, and I don't have to deal with more than friends to play with.
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?
I bought the game after watching a friend play for 20 minutes. It seemed really interesting, but I shortly found out you play the same 10 missions over and over. APB was only fun when you had a full group of people dinking around on a mission. When playing solo I found it really unsatisfying being steamrolled by people who had bought gear via the APB points to real cash exchange.
An average game session would first start out with issues connecting to the account server, only to find a character that had been locked out of the game by some server side error. After starting a new character and trying to rank up with a certain faction, I would undoubtedly get 10-20 pursuit missions where the opposing players were 100 ranks above my own. Then I would randomly crash to either desktop or their error catching system. Another outcome would be some horrid frame rates and some weird graphical glitches (Mind you I have a 6 core proc, 8 gigs of ram and 2 5850s). I would average 50-60 FPS in crossfire, but then I would get graphical glitches where people would be invisible or they would glow like a light bulb.
Overall, I wish I could get my money back. Next time I am going to wait at least 6 months for a game like this before buying. I also bought hellgate: London, but I did love that game.
... more often then not have no idea what they are doing, nor do they understand the gaming audience. I knew it was going to fail as soon as I heard of it. The game industry is filled with a bunch of people with a huge herd mentality, this is why we end up with so many god damn clones of everything.
Myself and a few friends were very excited about the release of APB
....
.....
Then we discovered that APB was not available for purchase in Australia and there were rumours we would not be able to play on the servers even if we did acquire a copy
As far as I'm concerned they dug their own graves by limiting the release, review and playability of the game
And I had such high hopes
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.
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 went down too after while.
You're MMO has to be a GINORMOUS success these days to succeed. You can't just sqeak by with these large releases.
They should have done it gmail-invite style or something, then scaled it up and fixed bugs.
i wonder about this number too. you cant make a mmo with this number of people, makes no sense. its impossible to make a good game with so many people spread around. maybe in north korea with a strong dictator leading the way ...
so how many people do you need to make APB ?
1 to make the game and 299 to ...
Yeah, I see lots of people talking about "Well, if they had the money to do _x_..." and so on, but that's just it -- they had the money but they blew it. Pretty damn fast. $100 million in angel, seed, and investment dollars for a game that reportedly (according to the previous article I read about this fiasco) was ordered less than 10,000 times worldwide.
$100,000,000 == 10,000 players. Hell, even if we give them 100,000 players that was still only $5,000,000 or so that they got as ROI from game sales and another (I'm estimating here) $2,000,000 per month from subscriptions - not including upkeep costs, salaries, and so on - it would take them over 5 _years_ at that rate to pay back the initial expenditure of capital. 100 million dollars to sink the entire company in 3 months of being "live"...
I'm in the wrong business.
APB was a great game. I don't regret one minute of gametime. There was something special about this one and I'm really sad to see it go.
APB has really changed the way I look at gaming and gamers now.
I will have many fond memories.
I wrote this post for another website:
I'm a Threat 15 (highest threat-Win:Loss Ratio) Enforcer on LaRocha
I'm sad about its demise. I believe it was one of the best games to come out in a long time. I really believe a lot of people who would have liked the game didn't give it a time of day because of bad reviews.
I used to put a lot of faith in reviews. After putting in a lot of time actually playing the game, I'm convinced a lot of reviewers barely gave it enough time to understand the game, let alone play it. I have completely reevaluated my stance on taking a lot of reviewers word for it. I saw their lazy writing in this one.
The game did have problems. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't perfect. But the things that bother me the most is that so much misinformation gets floated about the game that is just plain dead wrong.
A lot of people I don't think understand the process of putting a game like this together. I saw the genius in it.
Strengths:
* 2 maps. How can two maps be a strength? When you realize it is more like 1000 maps put into a single contained world. So by my definition, APB had 2000 maps over two worlds. This led to a randomness in the game. You'd have to drive in between "maps" with a thousand things going on in between you and your objective. This led to a wonderful randomness that sometimes worked for you and other times worked against you.
* Improvisational gameplay. Items could end up in areas specifically not designed for a battle. You had to on the fly make decisions on where to be to be most advantageous.
* Shooting was less important in this game. I'd say 70 percent of the game was shooting, 30 percent was driving. Driving ability was really important. So if you aren't the best Counterstrike aimer in the world, you'd have value if you could keep your sports car on the road. Good driving was a skill in this game.
* Knowledge was power. People complained about upgrades being too powerful. As someone who also started a new character frequently, I didn't have a problem with upgraded people. Why? Because I knew the ins and outs of the game better. So when a newbie gets decimated he blames the powerful gun his opponent used. But I know that if they changed equipment, the player with more knowledge would win despite the upgrades.
Weaknesses:
* Matchmaking. The number one thing that killed this game was matchmaking. It put to much power in the hands of the players. Players could decide on what missions to take. Experienced players would take the missions they knew would be easy. New players would take anything and eventually get matched up with experienced players. So what ended up happening is you had a public group going against a clan. So you had the equivalent of IDRA going up against bronze players. You had Fatality going up against new Quakelive players. You put the best tactical Counterstrike clan into a public de_dust2 server. New player dies. New player dies. New player dies. New Player dies. This game is shit and quits. 90 percent of the people who played this game ran into this. Upgraded guns just fueled the fire in the new players head. This game could not be played solo. If you went solo, the game would be a lot slower. A lot more boring. And sounds a lot like a lot of the reviews I read about the game. Basically if you jumped into a TF2 server, played one on one for 5 hours then decided, oh I'll join a public server with a group and end up going against the number one TF2 team, would your opinion about the game change?
* Cheating got completely out of hand. Those hardcore players who c