APB: Finally, I Can Be A PUNK!

[Mrbloodworth]

I'm not sure where people are getting 100 million. RTW got funding of 50 mill, however not all of that was for APB much went to My world. I do believe this was even said by one of the red names in this very thread.

[sam, an eggplant]

According to the article I linked, they got $104m in four rounds of venture capital. How much of that went to myworld is unknown. Some of it did, certainly. At any rate, most of that value is destroyed now.

[Sky]

How could anyone anticipate it performing so badly? Even Age of Conan initially sold through 600k; its problem was retention.

Don't beta a game that's not fun. I fucking love GTA and APB was godawful. The controls didn't work, no matter how much you Bloodworthed the case. Agreed on character creation, I really liked the guy I whipped together.
On AoC: Tortuga was worth the box price, especially what I paid for it. And I really enjoyed the game for a while after Tortuga, too. Tortuga has set the bar for what a game should be like for the first 20 levels, introducing your story in a very compelling way.

APB would've been a great niche game, but they decided to shoot the moon, and as with most moon-shooting situations, missed.

[Lantyssa]

I don't think anybody knew about it.  Did they even have physical copies?  All my internet friends were like, "wut?" when I told them about the beta.

There was very little marketing.  I think one of the RTW employee quotes mentioned that as a significant mis-management step.

[Mrbloodworth]

Not, really. Both projects seem to be technical success. By that, I mean the tech and tools created. Blizzard, SOE and EA have all flown to the location in attempts to capture some of the talent being let go. On top of this, it appears that both APB and my world are now in a heavy bidding war by some interested parties.

Due to 'interest' from potential buyers, twenty three employees have been offered the opportunity to come back on board at Realtime Worlds, according to administrator Ken Pattullo. The employees approached by administrators are those who were working on the recently announced MyWorld project.

  

 “As a smaller entity MyWorld is attracting considerable interest from potential buyers and 23 members of the team who had been working on the project clearly add value to it as a standalone business, hence the fact we have been able to offer a limited number of those jobs back.”

In addition, Pattullo confirmed that 53 positions have been retained at Realtime Worlds, with 157 made 'redundant' not including the 60 previously laid off.

  

“We want to offer reassurance to gamers that APB will not only continue as an online service but will be improved and supported 100 per cent during this restructuring,” he added.

Also note, APB is still in development, and still online. I was personally extremely impressed with the tech created for the game, it seems for the most part, its the 3ed party things that failed the platform (Punkbuster, and unreal). The gui system (scaleform + custom), the servers and capacity (custom), the memory management (custom) put into the unreal engine (To the point where, I bet the engine is unrecognizable as unreal anymore), the network layer (custom) all extremely impressive.

The newest patch on the PTW is also getting quite good feedback. I did note that it seems a good deal of this was tipped over by the ceasing of tax credits in the area. The game released to early, it got some bad reviews, and really low sales. I feel a good portion of this though, is because it was a shooter, not just a shooter, but a shooter using older playstyles (one hit box, no recoil, no modern post-process beyond bloom, quasi MMO camera system in a third person over the shoulder game). There isn't a large genre that pushes rendering, or computer power more than FPS genre, so creating it in a "massive" play field where most MMG's are at least 5 years behind in just about every regard comparatively, you will have to make sacrifices, and you will get pegged for those sacrifices.

I still feel, any "shooter" like (TR doesn't count) is going to have an uphill battle appealing to the MMO crowd, in the areas of rendering bling, max players, map sizes and most of all, payment models.

Objectively:

Pro:
The game was fun, right out the box. (instant actions, consistent, readily available, multiplied by friends, no segmentation of those friends)
The visuals were impressive for a game where 100 players could be in the same view at any given time (reduced to 80 because of slower client machines having issues) with custom buffered streamed textures in the thousands.
Incredible user tool system.
Incredible development tools.
Some really talented and stunning artwork and theme.

Con:
Released to early.
Reliance on 3ed party software for critical things.
Attempting to appeal to the RPG user and the Shooter fan.
Large system requirements compared to users preconceived value in those visuals. (Shooter, pushing the hardware again but because of the MMG overhead, it didn't translate to pure visual bang)
Monetizing model. While I think it was a good deal, and highly flexible, selling it to RPG players would be a challenge, shooter players and unspeakable battle.
Lack of explanation of the game, and system lead to some bad reviews or huge misconceptions.
Short time to kill, where other games that employ a RPG like system the time to kill in this title was extremely short. A stark contrast to predecessors like Planetside or Global agenda IE: APB is Low hit points, high damage, short lifespan ETC..

[sam, an eggplant]

APB is still in development, and still online.

The scuttlebutt is they retained a skeleton crew of maybe 40 people (out of over 200) to keep the game running while trying desperately to sell it. I wouldn't expect a great deal of additional content. It's in maintenance mode at best. At worst, they're smoking doobies, stealing office supplies, and surfing dice.com all day. I know I would.

As for the rest of your comments about its innovations, technology, etc, they remind me of that guy Huu arguing with DS.PhD over Alganon-- nobody gives a rat's ass about how you think your failure advanced the genre or your technology platform revolutionized the whatsit. The game's the thing.

APB sold only 10k copies and destroyed $104m in investor value. it's a historically large debacle.

[LK]

100 million dollars in development costs.

10,000 box sales.

Why are you still lobbing any compliments on this game. Hey, the train may have wrecked because it was built, as a whole, to be very shitty, but LOOK AT ITS PAINT JOB.

[Mrbloodworth]

The game's the thing.

Of course.

[HaemishM]

And the game had HUGE problems.

[Sky]

Ok, I've thrown in my 2¢, now that BW is trying to cheerlead the failure of the game, I'm outta here again. Ye gods, man.

The deck chairs on the titanic were outstanding.

[koro]

For what it's worth, the game probably actually sold around 100k copies. Still pretty terrible and in no way, shape, or form even close to recouping any portion of that investment, but not quite as abysmal as 10,000.

[Triforcer]

100 million dollars for THIS?  Jesus monkeyfucking christ, that can't be right.

[Merusk]

Interesting that in the dissection of the game, nobody's mentioned the weakest point another reviewer I read did.  Basically that Guns + MMOLootz =  .

If you're making a shooter and the unlocks aren't different guns, but simply "Newbie Gun + 5,10,20...140 damage"  you're really fucking things up.   That's a fundamental flaw in your system design.  That it wasn't caught only illustrates that the game was doomed from the start.

[Margalis]

it seems for the most part, its the 3ed party things that failed the platform (Punkbuster, and unreal). The gui system (scaleform + custom), the servers and capacity (custom), the memory management (custom) put into the unreal engine (To the point where, I bet the engine is unrecognizable as unreal anymore), the network layer (custom) all extremely impressive.

Nobody forced them to use those 3rd party tools. For 100 million and the amount of time they had they could have written their own engine from scratch twice. Unreal is the core engine, they chose to use it and they had years to make it work. If it doesn't work for their game that is 100% their fault.

Edit: I'm not trying to get down on the APB guys too much, these things happen, but your PR spin is really incredible.

[Ginaz]

$100 million???  The best analogy that I heard to compare this amount of fail with is Heaven's Gate.  APB...the "Heaven's gate" of mmo's.

[statisticalfool]

Interesting that in the dissection of the game, nobody's mentioned the weakest point another reviewer I read did.  Basically that Guns + MMOLootz =  .

If you're making a shooter and the unlocks aren't different guns, but simply "Newbie Gun + 5,10,20...140 damage"  you're really fucking things up.   That's a fundamental flaw in your system design.  That it wasn't caught only illustrates that the game was doomed from the start.

Oh, it was actually mentioned quite a bunch in this thread that having gun upgrades be all positive was pretty bad.

You can compensate for this based on matchmaking, and my guess was that they were totally expecting the magical matchmaking system (and call for backup) and such to compensate. But I don't think they ever matched directly based on qualify of weapon, and the matchmaking was kind of terrible anyway, so gear imbalances ahoy.

[Threash]

Yeah, matchmaking took into account things like win/loss ratio, threat level,  and total rank when it should have simply looked at your upgrades and your weapon/upgrades and matched based on that.  It would have likely ended up with worse matches but people wouldn't have been as pissed.  Specially since it was so easily abused by high level players lowering their threat to farm noobs.

[Kageru]

It wouldn't work anyway since it would only match-make within the instance which is a very small pool to draw from. Even further when some of them are grouped and others are engaged. Finding a challenge against, for example, an experienced group working as a team is just unlikely. Their idea of having an active city and fights breaking out and escalating organically was fine but it either needed to pull from a lobby/social area or have a much larger population in an active action zone.

But it all really makes sense when you hear the company owner didn't like design in advance. No ones going to tell him that doesn't fly and developers start getting distracted by really sexy, but ultimately peripheral, customization code.

[statisticalfool]

It wouldn't work anyway since it would only match-make within the instance which is a very small pool to draw from. Even further when some of them are grouped and others are engaged. Finding a challenge against, for example, an experienced group working as a team is just unlikely. Their idea of having an active city and fights breaking out and escalating organically was fine but it either needed to pull from a lobby/social area or have a much larger population in an active action zone.

But it all really makes sense when you hear the company owner didn't like design in advance. No ones going to tell him that doesn't fly and developers start getting distracted by really sexy, but ultimately peripheral, customization code.

Yeah, in the end, 80-100 people is just too small to pull from for PVP alone.

I was just about to say something about different skill districts for different skill levels, with promotion and relegation, with enough incentive to play in the EPL to disincentivize downranking (along with other catches, like factoring in top skill level ever), but screw it. If the management couldn't be bothered to design their own game...

[UnSub]

I get that RTW wanted to see what arose from their own game, but it ended up with APB feeling pretty empty / basic. Great to aim for some kind of next gen CounterStrike, but map and weapon balance was core to the success of CS and APB had neither.

[Mrbloodworth]

it seems for the most part, its the 3ed party things that failed the platform (Punkbuster, and unreal). The gui system (scaleform + custom), the servers and capacity (custom), the memory management (custom) put into the unreal engine (To the point where, I bet the engine is unrecognizable as unreal anymore), the network layer (custom) all extremely impressive.

Nobody forced them to use those 3rd party tools. For 100 million and the amount of time they had they could have written their own engine from scratch twice. Unreal is the core engine, they chose to use it and they had years to make it work. If it doesn't work for their game that is 100% their fault.

Edit: I'm not trying to get down on the APB guys too much, these things happen, but your PR spin is really incredible.

I was referring to all the work required to get unreal into a MMG state (See vanguard, GA, AION?) , combined with all the unique system they must have had to create on top (more than the max players, lack of helmet hair, overcoming unreal network limits, adding in the dynamic texture buffering and applying ETC...) of and get everything to play nice together, not an easy task. As for Punkbuster it seems like they added it to the game really late in the development, and were leaning on it to solve most if not all hacking and spoofing issues.  I'm not sure, given all that has to be done to unreal to go beyond 32 player (among other things( that using it was worth it, I suspect it was chosen because it has a great asset pipeline. Another side affect of using an existing and long lived engine is you inherent all its hacks, seems they didn't account for much in the client server and were leaning on Punkbuster to do the heavy lifting here.

Anyway, you should calm down.

[sam, an eggplant]

Anyway, you should clam down.

I prefer definition 3.

[Mrbloodworth]

Typos are fun 

[Lantyssa]

Unless you're the one to land on a rock.

[TripleDES]

Given that UE3 supports at least 64 players (which I'd assume would just be a constant that can be changed, it'd be silly to hardcode that throughout the code), had viable network code, gun play as well as vehicle physics, I'm confused as to why they've gutted the engine so much. The additional stuff, like for instance synced NPCs, could have been implemented on a complementary protocol.

[Mrbloodworth]

Realtime Worlds, developer of the embattled All Points Bulletin currently in 'administration' and looking for a buyer, has announced that its flagship title has 130,000 registered players that average four hours of playtime per day. These figures come from Realtime Worlds' administrator, Paul Dounis.

   

Joint administrator Paul Dounis, of business rescue and restructuring specialist Begbies Traynor commented “These are healthy numbers and reflect positively on APB as a ongoing concern. They prove this is a very enjoyable game, which is shown by the average player daily playtime and an ARPPU (Average Revenue per Paying User) that is highest of any game out there”

APB is currently on the block and, at least according to Dounis, there are interested buyers on 'both sides of the Atlantic.

[LC]

Realtime Worlds, developer of the embattled All Points Bulletin currently in 'administration' and looking for a buyer, has announced that its flagship title has 130,000 registered players that average four hours of playtime per day. These figures come from Realtime Worlds' administrator, Paul Dounis.

   

Joint administrator Paul Dounis, of business rescue and restructuring specialist Begbies Traynor commented “These are healthy numbers and reflect positively on APB as a ongoing concern. They prove this is a very enjoyable game, which is shown by the average player daily playtime and an ARPPU (Average Revenue per Paying User) that is highest of any game out there”

APB is currently on the block and, at least according to Dounis, there are interested buyers on 'both sides of the Atlantic.

That sounds a lot like "PLEASE BUY THIS TURD"

[Rendakor]

"We promise it'll make you money! Even if it didn't make us money!"

[Sparky]

Is SOE still snapping up failed MMOs for their Station Pass?  Seems like a perfect candidate.

[sam, an eggplant]

That statement is a great example of extremely careful phrasing and spin. Lets break it down.

1) They sold 130k copies. I guess 120,000 were digital distribution? The 10k number came from NPD figures. Still, it's pretty terrible, under 25% of AoC.

2) The average user is logged in 4 hours per day, but the social districts are free. It doesn't disclose how many hours are used in the action districts.

3) The average paying player pays $28/month. This is actually an excellent number taken without context.

4) But we don't get that context. They're not disclosing how many of those 130,000 converted to paying accounts. Remember the game comes with 50 hours of playtime. That's a lot of gameplay for any non-MMO. Freeplay MMOs have a conversion rate of what, 5-10%? If they hit 10% at $28/player, that's only $350k/month in revenue. The game cost over one hundred million dollars.

[Kageru]

Yep, this game probably has Vanguard beaten in the "Exploding on the launch-pad" stakes. And with the sort of retention they have good luck on selling it for anything other than a token amount. And even then the amount of money, time and people you'll lose while you fix it makes this a really poor investment... barring maybe buying it and stripping out some of the tech.

[UnSub]

Also, the time period for that $28 - how much of that is still box sale money? That's a one-off bump. How many players still haven't used up their 50 hours from the box purchase?

APB could do an EVE-style revival, but someone would have to buy it super-cheap to pull that off.

[Threash]

I don't know what it means but the RTW point to ingame cash trade value was always extremely out of whack.  You could buy 3 months playing time with about 5 days worth of in game money.

[IainC]

Given that UE3 supports at least 64 players (which I'd assume would just be a constant that can be changed, it'd be silly to hardcode that throughout the code), had viable network code, gun play as well as vehicle physics, I'm confused as to why they've gutted the engine so much. The additional stuff, like for instance synced NPCs, could have been implemented on a complementary protocol.

Unreal is hardcapped at 100 players per server (where 'server' means instance/zone rather than MMO server). That's a hard cap even if you only render avatars as boxes with names on them.

[Koyasha]

Social districts tend to have more than 100 per instance.  Not sure how that works, but I know the social districts were rarely under 100 when I was playing regular-like.  Since then I got kinda busy and didn't have much time to put into it, then kinda lost interest.