Realtime Worlds community manager details dev's final days

by Alexander Sliwinski on Nov 2nd 2010 10:20PM

Eurogamer's piece on Realtime Worlds' collapse is an interesting read for anyone curious about the final weeks of the developer. The studio collapsed in September, shortly after launching APB, a Grand Theft Auto-esque MMO that ran out of gas after 86 days.

Almost the whole piece is told through the words of Realtime Worlds' Community Officer Ben Bateman. His story is relentlessly optimistic about the state of the studio and the development of APB, especially so during the portion where he tells of QA's warnings and complaints from APB beta testers being acknowledged, but ultimately ignored.

Acknowledgment of reality doesn't set in until after APB launches and the hard subscription figures showed the game wasn't going to make it. Then come the painful details of how layoffs went down and how the studio eventually shut down. Give it a read for the human interest angle on a sad business tale.

Source: Eurogamer

Tags: APB, Dave-Jones, pc, Realtime-Worlds

Reader Comments (10)

I know most people didn't get this game because they felt the multiplayer match for GTA was just as good. Plus paying to use ingame voice and to not hear / see ads when at loading screens turned off all my friends.

@The Aquacharger

"Plus paying to use ingame voice and to not hear / see ads when at loading screens turned off all my friends."

Yeah, it's not like they needed that money.

@eliteghost
Well, payign an addtional $10 a month to remove ads, then $10 more a month to buy voice really turned people off. Most people I know who preordered on STEAM didn't even download the game as soon as they found that out. I knew quite a few people who were excited for this game, but as soon as it let out about the money grubbing a lot of people didn't subscribe.

Like, do you honestly think any MMO that ,when it first starts, has it so you need to pay $15 a month + extra monthly fees to enjoy the game without being bothered with ads. Or to even use the voice function of the game? To me that just sounds like the company expects the game to fail.

@The Aquacharger

You've got your facts wrong. You didn't have to pay $10 a month to remove ads, and another $10 for voice. Voice was included with your game sub.

I never even paid the ad removal price and still never heard an ad anyway.

Nor did I ever pay a subscription cost. Their ingame points system had everything paid for me.