APB: Finally, I Can Be A PUNK!

[Der Helm]

I think I still got a few hours of gametime left. 

[Dark_MadMax]

Some1 explain to me where all these dead MMO go. Shitload money invested, lots of code, working servers ,billing system and yet they completely dead. Why not sell them to first person willing to buy, heck I d  ran the servers  from my own pocket and would even pay royalty from any income I make

[Hoax]

Fuck these guys serves them right for being so bad at their jobs.

Game was a pile. Billing/revenue was so stupid you had to be shutting out reality to not be aware of the fact. Review ban was lulz, proof they knew how shit the game was but released it anyway.

For real. Fuck these guys. Double fuck them in fact because they will be used as proof that new ideas lead to massive failure and everyone will bend over twice as backwards to convince the moneybags that they are making something just like WoW.

[Rendakor]

Some1 explain to me where all these dead MMO go. Shitload money invested, lots of code, working servers ,billing system and yet they completely dead. Why not sell them to first person willing to buy, heck I d  ran the servers  from my own pocket and would even pay royalty from any income I make

The company was (might still be) on sale for a while actually; I heard mention of potential buyers, but it doesn't look like anyone actually bought it.

[fuser]

Some1 explain to me where all these dead MMO go. Shitload money invested, lots of code, working servers ,billing system and yet they completely dead. Why not sell them to first person willing to buy, heck I d  ran the servers  from my own pocket and would even pay royalty from any income I make

Office is shuttered liquidators take care of hardware (server/desktops/chairs/desks), bigger stuff like production servers were probably co-located at a datacenter so thats pulled out and sold the same. Billing system would be fairly simple to customize because at a store they are selling an inventory item "point" at a set rate. Same goes for forums/support/etc, probably heavily customized but no value besides the base license.

The only real value from the carcass is the IP (code/toolkits) and any 3rd party licenses(Unreal engine, audio, etc). They are not looking to collect royalties or setup a new service. The administrators(the actual company) are there to get the business shuttered and recoup as much money as feasibly possible. It's a failed product and as such they are probably just willing to sell the IP at a bargain price to get out of the investment.

They spun off the my world IP so far transferring over the team/office/etc. Epic is rumored to be in talks as the APB IP was built around Unreal and would give them additional features to customers along with engine licensing.

[Furiously]

Maybe they pulled a "Producers".

[squirrel]

Nope. The Producers was good.

[LC]

Anyone need a copy?

http://cgi.ebay.com/APB-All-Points-Bulletin-PC-DVD-Game-BRAND-NEW-SEALED-/380270270885?pt=Video_Games_Games&hash=item5889dfd9a5

I love the warning:

Be careful about others on eBay selling the game from other countries, ours are from the US.

[UnSub]

Some1 explain to me where all these dead MMO go. Shitload money invested, lots of code, working servers ,billing system and yet they completely dead. Why not sell them to first person willing to buy, heck I d  ran the servers  from my own pocket and would even pay royalty from any income I make

If you're someone like NCsoft, selling it makes no sense - use the loss as a tax write-off and reallocate resources. If they sold it to someone and they managed to make the MMO hugely successful, it just creates more competition for future NCsoft titles.

From RTW's point of view, they are liquidating the company. Everything must go. APB is worth more in parts than as a working title.

Whoever buys it (and they mention that 300 different parties were interested enough to contact them, but even the shortlist of 6 didn't make an offer because it is actually cheaper to buy the parts after the game tanks) isn't going to open up the APB servers again (well, maybe as F2P). They've already identified that the most players APB could currently attract is 130k and that's not a number to get excited about when a new MMO could attract more people. Plus existing players aren't going to want to pay box cost again and then there's the issue of what to do with existing player resources ($s, RTW Points, etc).

If Epic does buy it, they are doing so to rip it apart. Those character customisation tools were very nice and some of the other customisation facilities were pretty good. Perhaps some of the back-end stuff is also worth getting cheap.

Why don't they sell a dying MMO to the first people who make an offer? Because MMOs are a business, not a dream factory. The administrator is there to get some money back to RTW's creditors, not make players happy.

If you wanted to keep playing APB, your only chance would be to find someone running pirate servers. Good luck in your search. 

[UnSub]

I don't think I've even taken the shrink wrap off my copy yet :-(

In 30 years, that'll be worth something.

[Rendakor]

You really expect the price of coasters to rise that much in 30 years?

[LC]

You really expect the price of coasters to rise that much in 30 years?

Maybe they will find a way to grind them up and turn them into sex pills for email spam.

[hyuu]

You really expect the price of coasters to rise that much in 30 years?

Maybe they will find a way to grind them up and turn them into sex pills for email spam.

There's also the inflation factor. In 30 years, the $100m they spent on it will coincidentally be the same denomination of coin you need to access a public restroom and make an APB of your own.


(Kidding, of course. My heart goes out to everyone who worked hard on the game but saw it fail to forces outside their control.)

[Ironwood]

Having been involved in the liquidation of a Scottish software house before, I can assure you that it's a brutal tearing and rending of hopes and dreams.

I saw posters on the wall for an RPG I would have totally bought and played.

 

[waffel]

I don't think I've even taken the shrink wrap off my copy yet :-(

In 30 years, that'll be worth something.

[TripleDES]

Too bad APB didn't fail sooner. Would have been nice to see the character customization stuff in Mass Effect 3. 

[Dark_MadMax]

If you're someone like NCsoft, selling it makes no sense - use the loss as a tax write-off and reallocate resources. If they sold it to someone and they managed to make the MMO hugely successful, it just creates more competition for future NCsoft titles.

So they just throw stuff away. Whatever happened to auto assault, earth and beyound and countless others?  Making mmo is hard and costs lots of money, the failures which are gone not necessarily were rotten trough and trough, the chronicles of spellborn  (one of most recent demises) was fairly decent and stable on technical side

If you wanted to keep playing APB, your only chance would be to find someone running pirate servers. Good luck in your search. 

See if I wanted pirate server I would make one of wow emu ones .They are very mature - check out lawsuits and scandals recently, the wow emu servers are stable enough to make money as f2p. I mean if there was a legal way to get client/server I bet many people would jump on it. Make it like franchise model - you pay part of your income (if you make any), not pay anything upfront. People would customize the rules and fill the niches currently ignored by big companies. Yeah sure you could invest lots of time and even money in wow emu server but then blizzard will come and slap you with $80 lawsuit :/

[UnSub]

Dead MMOs are pretty much dead. Lots of time and effort goes into things that flop in the market and that process happens all the time.

Occasionally someone comes back to resurrect them - Heatwave Interactive picked up Gods and Heroes and indicates they plan to launch the title, Ryzom has died and revived a number of times with different investors -  but the reality is that if a title fails in the market, it fails for a reason that may make reviving it pretty unlikely. It isn't necessarily because they are bad titles, just that they couldn't find a player base to cover their investment costs and ongoing expenses. If a game couldn't find a player base the first time round, why would they find it the second time? (EvE is the exception to the rule, as always.)

Regarding pirate servers: I don't approve of them personally, but if someone set up an APB pirate server it is unlikely to see legal action against it unless someone actually ends up buying APB. The decentralised franchise model you're suggesting sounds like a nightmare to try and collect royalties from.

[NiX]

So they just throw stuff away. Whatever happened to auto assault, earth and beyound and countless others?  Making mmo is hard and costs lots of money, the failures which are gone not necessarily were rotten trough and trough, the chronicles of spellborn  (one of most recent demises) was fairly decent and stable on technical side

I imagine they just archive, shelve it and once and awhile someone looks at it for ideas, but not much more. Heck, I can imagine that in the earlier days stuff would just get lost. If you ever read up on Ultima Online you'll hear tons of stories about how the original devs never commented their code or created documentation so by the time the 4th or so expansion came out the backend of the game was a complete mess.

[Lantyssa]

Various things can happen to a dead MMO.  One, there may not be anyone with much of a legal right to use the code.  It might be of questionable value, with no good way to evaluate it.  As part of a tax write-off or receivership, it might go into some black hole where it is not allowed to be accessed.  Rights could go to insurance or someone else who doesn't know what to do with it or doesn't care to pursue further investment.  Or maybe no one is buying but there are contractual obligations that it can only sell for a certain value, such as enough to recoup its investment.

Basically, if someone can make money off it, they'll do what they can to sell.  Most of the time they can't, and businesses aren't generally in the habit of giving away proprietary information for a host of reasons.

[Kageru]

The code immediately loses significant value without the people who built it and know how to maintain and extend it. Building up your own people to be able to work with the code base is not immediate or free. And it has already been proven that the game without a lot more work will have only a meager capacity to generate revenue. Especially now that its name is a recognised keyword to total and abject failure.

Much better to buy the game and rip it apart for the bits that are strong, self-contained and have value as foundations for something new to be built.
 

[Dark_MadMax]

The code immediately loses significant value without the people who built it and know how to maintain and extend it. Building up your own people to be able to work with the code base is not immediate or free. And it has already been proven that the game without a lot more work will have only a meager capacity to generate revenue. Especially now that its name is a recognised keyword to total and abject failure.

Much better to buy the game and rip it apart for the bits that are strong, self-contained and have value as foundations for something new to be built.
 

You guys  make it sounds like code is worthless. Well it isnt. I dabbled in wow emu modification in my spare time and its not that hard ( as hard as any other big piece of software) ,  many people do it for no financial reward. Besides code  (client /back end combo is huge BTW) there are also art assets which took a lot of time to create and put together. That are all things which  makes making MMO expensive.  I think there must be some perverse incentive when its more "profitable" to  write it off as investment failure for tax purposes than to turn it into F2P or franchise

 Look guys there are people out there coding MMO emulators, there are people running emu  servers. They all  try to stay under radar and can not make much money of it because of lawsuits.  If they could do it legally they would advertise , maybe even hire staff as they expand , and who knows  -they could turn into a successfully   self sustaining projects!

[Rendakor]

Spoiler: Even failed companies don't want to see someone else making money off their work.

[Lantyssa]

Look guys there are people out there coding MMO emulators, there are people running emu  servers. They all  try to stay under radar and can not make much money of it because of lawsuits.  If they could do it legally they would advertise , maybe even hire staff as they expand , and who knows  -they could turn into a successfully   self sustaining projects!

I'm betting they didn't pay a dime to the companies that made the games they're emulating, either...  There's your "perverse incentive" on why the code isn't given away.

[Minvaren]

Look guys there are people out there coding MMO emulators, there are people running emu  servers. They all try to stay under radar and can not make much money of it because of lawsuits.  If they could do it legally they would advertise, maybe even hire staff as they expand, and who knows - they could turn into a successfully self sustaining projects!

I'm betting they didn't pay a dime to the companies that made the games they're emulating, either...  There's your "perverse incentive" on why the code isn't given away.

See the bolded part above.  "Here's your take for us emulating your dead IP without permission" is all but a bulls-eye for lawyers.  In the end, EMU server up > EMU server down.

Communities have offered to purchase/license the server portions of dying/dead MMOGs before, but it never works out for a variety of reasons.

[Lantyssa]

A big one probably being a "community" isn't a legal entity as far as the transfer of a license or tax purposes.  It would be foolish for there not to exist all kinds of what-if clauses about what to do with a property should it fail or need to be transferred.  If it's based on an established IP, there's even more reason it'll never happen.

[Samprimary]

That makes it legendary epic fail.

Artifact-level fail.

Warhammer Online
Age of Conan
Tabula Rasa
APB

[Threash]

Conan a bigger failure than warhammer? i don't see it.

[pxib]

Not bigger... rarer.

Warhammer failed (pretty spectacularly) attempting to do what everybody else was doing. Conan failed despite some genuinely clever innovation on familiar concepts, Tabula Rasa had a lot of weird ideas, but APB wasn't even a DIKU (or, for that matter, a MMORPG)..

[LC]

Turning one of these failed mmos into a "build your own mmo" kit could do well.

[Samprimary]

Not bigger... rarer.

yaaaap. I guess you could rate alternatively by severity of fail, which, again, puts APB into the artifact category.

[Kageru]

Turning one of these failed mmos into a "build your own mmo" kit could do well.

Which is probably what Epic will do with it.

[Dark_MadMax]

I'm betting they didn't pay a dime to the companies that made the games they're emulating, either...  There's your "perverse incentive" on why the code isn't given away.

Its not like they can even if they wanted to.   I mean realistically many guys with successful wow emu servers would pay blizzard a cut of their income as long as it reasonable  , but blizzards simply doesn't want any competition. Also WoW emu contain 0 code from blizzard, if being technical  on server side the only things from blizzard are text resources. It is hard to make a good ,stable well performing MMO client, but as far as server side goes emus are pretty damn good for open source free software, good enough for some stable servers to have community willing to pay for it . 

Art assets and stable client is the proprietary part their users "steal", but on dead mmos those things are just wasted away , thats why I am angry at corporate execs preferring tax writes offs to working community projects

[Rasix]

edit: Actually, nevermind.  No good can come of this.

[LK]

It's completely illogical from a business perspective to allow a third-party make money off of something they had no hand in its creation. Hey! Running a server is easy! Creating something good to put on it is the tricky part.