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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."
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?
Maybe you heard of it by its other name, All Points Bulletin. It was slated to be a cops and robbers mmo. Lots of controversy thanks to its "pay a monthly fee and recv. in-game advertisements, including audio advertisements and billboards"
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.
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
Sturgeon was an optimist.
-1 (Bad Math)
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)
Yes, it means All Points Bulletin. It's a cops versus robbers MMO, hence the name.
*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 cash farming for a month's worth of play time.
I loved the game, and am sad to see it go, but I've been calling that It was going to die for the past month or so.
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.
Most people were NOT paying $28 a month. If I recall, it was like $7 for 20 hours of gameplay in the "action zones". The areas where you socialize, design cars/clothes/characters, find guilds were in social zones where your subscription time wasn't used.