Category Archives: Realtime Worlds

Welp, that’s all, folks.

Despite interest from 300 interested parties, none of a final shortlist of six were “comfortable with buying it as a live operation,” Les Able, spokesperson for Begbies Traynor, told our sister site GamesIndustry.biz this afternoon.

Able added that “staff had been told what the position is”, and the online multiplayer title is now expected to be shut down within the next 24 hours.

This may have already happened, as the eu.apb.com and na.apb.com websites are already offline. The online store is still up as of this writing for you to buy the game and in-game points, though that may not be the wisest of investments.

APB is the shortest-lived MMO ever, having launched on June 29, 80 days ago.

Ex-RTW technical lead Luke Halliwell on his blog yesterday blamed the community team for APB’s failure. Nope, not joking.

Stern-sounding codes of conduct were emailed around that, whatever their intent, in practice scared many developers away from interacting directly with our users. Not to worry, though, because our Community team was on the case! Except if a forum post was about a bug, because that wasn’t their area … bugs were for Customer Support. Who, naturally, didn’t read the forums … because that was Community’s job!

I can see how these rules make sense for big, established online games. Codes of conduct in-game to prevent developers abusing their inside position for in-game success. Codes of conduct on forums to prevent accidental PR disasters. Clear divisions between groups and processes for reporting bugs to ensure smooth handling of large volumes of data.

But these are all problems that successful games have. We had a different problem – engaging with our community and getting people to give a shit about our product – and all these rules and divisions just got in the way.

Actually, “getting people to give a shit about your product” is a bit more core an issue than finger-pointing over who gets to play forum warrior.

As my *fair*, *balanced*, and *not at all a pack of wild mongeese* community of readers has already noted, Halliwell’s followups are far less, um, fingerpointery and delve more into structural issues that plague most projects you shovel money into hoping delicious development candy comes out…

When we received the initial $30m to develop MyWorld, management literally reverse-engineered a “hiring curve” (a graph of team size against time) from 3 parameters: the budget available, the desired launch date (set by the investors), and our internal figure for the maximum rate we were able to hire people at (this was the only good part of the plan – Dundee put the brakes on for us!). There are obviously far better ways to plan a project, and I could spend a whole post discussing just that, but for now I just want to focus in on the unquestioned assumption that we should set out to spend all the money.

This attitude infected our company culture at many levels. Almost everything we did, we sought to throw people at, and our hiring created inefficiencies all over the place.

Along with political turf wars…

Opposed to Red was a group that for the sake of argument we’ll call Blue, with diametrically opposed views. Quietly and subtly, perhaps without many in the organisation noticing, these two groups fought for the company’s culture. Ultimately the Blues were destroyed. While probably numerically greater, they held less org-chart power and were forced to work hard for even small concessions. And while the Red relished the meetings and political fighting, the Blue were passionate about getting on with real work, about making our product better, and for the most part gave up the fight to focus on that. The Red weren’t averse to dirty tricks either, such as paying a key Blue to leave (that’s org-chart power for you).

…and having a CEO who can control people with the power of his mind.

The Reality Distortion Field was a double-edged sword for us. I’m pretty sure it was a big part of us raising $100m. It also obviously contributed to our complacency. If anything ever reached crisis point, Dave was always, always able to convince people that everything would be ok. I think at times this prevented us from actually taking problems as seriously as we should have.

I don’t blame Dave for that though; it’s a brilliant skill to have and I don’t think he ever wielded it maliciously. We were the fools for not staying hungry.

"Just walk away, venture capitalists. All you have to do is just walk away."

If you ever wanted the answer to the question “how to spend $100m on an MMO” (are you listening, Bioware?), the UK is the place to be this week, or at least to review the damage. Three sources from Britain analyze what is, if not a neutron bomb, at least a very explody one, with game industry recruiters already combing the wreckage for cheap ‘acquisitions’ of talent.

First, apparently from within the bunker, an anonymous commenter left a very detailed, very caustic comment on the British gaming blog site “Rock Paper Shotgun”

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.

Nicholas Lovell, at GamesBrief, comes right out and calls APB “a massive fail“. Well, when it kills your company, yeah.

Back in the summer of 2009, Dave said that with 100,000 to 200,000 players the game would do alright financially. I estimated that each player would have to spend £500 on the game for the investors to make their money back with those figures, which seemed unlikely to me. (That was when I thought the company had raised $50 million. It would be $1,000 based on $100m of investment.)

But 100,000 players, which I imagine seemed a laughably low target to the management of RealTime Worlds, is 10x the number of players who have even bought the game.

APB is turning out to be the games industry’s own Heaven’s Gate.

Lovell analyzes APB’s sales numbers and comes to the jarring conclusion that APB sold less than 10,000 units, which would, given its budget, easily make it the most ridiculously disastrous MMO launch of all time. Adam Martin, in his post on the subject, believes the number to be closer to 100,000 based on his sources, which brings it from “ridiculous disaster” to “unsustainable disappointment”. He goes on to contrast the discussion from within and about Realtime Worlds with his own experience with Tabula Rasa:

The professionals: you’re getting burned out, chewed up, and spat out. Your lives are being wasted.

The investors: you’re getting screwed. You write it off as random failure, and you can afford it, but you’re shying away from “games” as a result, leaving good profits behind on the table.

The inexperienced, the mediocre, and all those people who don’t actually MAKE the game, but do get to ruin the process (rockstar-designers, producers, marketers, directors, managers, etc) : you’re doing great. Your lack of skill hasn’t held you back, and the company will often go bankrupt before anyone gets around to firing you for incompetence.

Why yes, the game industry DOES make you that bitter and jaded. Especially when you watch $100,000,000.00 go circling down the drain.