APB: Finally, I Can Be A PUNK!

[Furiously]

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

Microsoft and Toys for Bob are the only two companies I can think of that have ever released a commercial game into the public domain after their lifecycle. (Mechcommander 2 and Starcontrol 2).

[koro]

Microsoft and Toys for Bob are the only two companies I can think of that have ever released a commercial game into the public domain after their lifecycle. (Mechcommander 2 and Starcontrol 2).

I believe Microsoft also did so with Allegiance years and years and years ago. Which only adds to your point, but still.

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.

If Epic nabs the character creation/customization system and tinkers with it enough to make it a part of the base Unreal Engine, that alone would be worth the asking price for APB.

[Dark_MadMax]

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.

 But its completely logical to let it die without ever seeing the light?  capitalist logic 101!

[Tarami]

[IainC]

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.

 But its completely logical to let it die without ever seeing the light?  capitalist logic 101!

A lot of code may include technology that the owner is not able to give away. Most games are built with a lot of middleware - tree rendering engines, physics simulators and so forth. The licence to use that will be granted only to the company that developed the game and typically can't be reassigned.

[tmp]

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.

 But its completely logical to let it die without ever seeing the light?  capitalist logic 101!

[Samprimary]

But its completely logical to let it die without ever seeing the light?  capitalist logic 101!

The 'logic' (as in, the pressing real world factors which lead to things like these getting picked apart and sold without the intact product ever being used again) has already been explained to you!

[Spiff]

Talking about capitalism;
just got a mail from Hi-Rez saying they felt so 'bad' (read: jizz in their pants happy) that APB tanked that they're giving a 'pity-discount' (read: 'the corpse may still be warm, but let's dance on the grave-discount').

More power to 'em I say!  

[UnSub]

Also WoW emu contain 0 code from blizzard, if being technical  on server side the only things from blizzard are text resources.

...  ...

[Mrbloodworth]

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

Microsoft and Toys for Bob are the only two companies I can think of that have ever released a commercial game into the public domain after their lifecycle. (Mechcommander 2 and Starcontrol 2).

Secondlife and Ryzom are, I believe open source in one manner or another.

[HaemishM]

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.

 But its completely logical to let it die without ever seeing the light?  capitalist logic 101!

These words... I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

[Musashi]

I hope they mean what I think they mean.

[Hoax]

They mean he's 17 and thinks he knows how the real world works?

Talking about capitalism;
just got a mail from Hi-Rez saying they felt so 'bad' (read: jizz in their pants happy) that APB tanked that they're giving a 'pity-discount' (read: 'the corpse may still be warm, but let's dance on the grave-discount').

More power to 'em I say!  

LULZ

[Kageru]

Good on em. I still think global agenda had an equally poor gameplay design but I have to give them props for sticking with it and working towards getting a clue.

I wouldn't be surprised if the other thing Epic would like are the changes to make the unreal engine MMO ready. I seem to recall several studios saying they had to do lots of work to the base engine for larger player counts and zones that MMO's require. Pick those up cheap from a defunct MMO and release "Unreal engine: MMO edition" for some easy cash and marketshare.

Which would probably be a good thing for MMOs too. If each of them does have to do substantial modification to the base engine then better that is standardized and they can spend their time thinking about gameplay and content.

[IainC]

I wouldn't be surprised if the other thing Epic would like are the changes to make the unreal engine MMO ready. I seem to recall several studios saying they had to do lots of work to the base engine for larger player counts and zones that MMO's require. Pick those up cheap from a defunct MMO and release "Unreal engine: MMO edition" for some easy cash and marketshare.

Which would probably be a good thing for MMOs too. If each of them does have to do substantial modification to the base engine then better that is standardized and they can spend their time thinking about gameplay and content.

I don't think APB adds a lot of MMO functionality to the base UE3 engine that Epic doesn't already have with Atlas. As I understand it RTW worked mostly entirely within the limitations of the engine unlike say Sigil who extensively rewrote the netcode.

[Kageru]

Oh? I  wonder what epic was so impressed with then... maybe it was the customisation engine.

It really would be fascinating to see a breakdown of where the 50'ish plus million went.

[Malakili]

It really would be fascinating to see a breakdown of where the 50'ish plus million went.

[UnSub]

It really would be fascinating to see a breakdown of where the 50'ish plus million went.

If RTW had 300 staff at $40k a year, that's $12m a year in staff salaries right there.

[Kageru]

Add another 50% for several layers of management I'm sure. But what were all those people doing? It can't have been gameplay design, zone design / PvE content (launching with 2 zones). The character customisation is really sexy but that still seems to leave a large gap between the number of people and the product.

[DayDream]

I'd have to read up again, but i thought that 300 included the management layers.  But, that 40k probably does not include benefits and physical infrastructure.

[UnSub]

I picked $40k as an average salary I've seen used elsewhere. Actual salaries would have varied.

Add to that things like rent (300 people need lots of space), infrastructure costs (hardware, software et al) and some of the other costs that businesses run into along with no revenue for years and that's where the money went.

On the face of it, $100m sounds like winning the lottery, but RTW showed that it is very easy to spend if you don't watch your costs.

[LK]

Add another 50% for several layers of management I'm sure. But what were all those people doing? It can't have been gameplay design, zone design / PvE content (launching with 2 zones). The character customisation is really sexy but that still seems to leave a large gap between the number of people and the product.

Meetings and Facebook.

[WayAbvPar]

It really would be fascinating to see a breakdown of where the 50'ish plus million went.

Even though I was expecting something similar, that made me LOL.

[koro]

Welp, EA tries to do at least somewhat right by customers by handing out free compensation games to APB buyers and then 4chan (and other various seedy sites) go and fuck it up by scamming the CS reps using screenshots from other peoples' purchases back in July.

So now EA will only recoup people who bought APB since early August (long after its critical and commercial savaging), which leaves the vast majority of the few people who actually bought APB out in the cold.

[Furiously]

I got my money's worth out of it.

[pxib]

I got my money's worth out of it.

I'm wondering if that's not part of the problem. Theoretically games with membership plans are supposed to inspire us to imagine there's more we could do if only we had more time. That I felt I got my money's worth out of the free month on WAR was a major part of why I didn't re-subscribe (also my very recent experience in Clone Wars Adventures). I finished everything that looked fun (and there was a little fun to be had) and then  decided to play something else.

Games that want additional money after the initial purchase can't afford to do that.

[UnSub]

45 minute interview with RTW's EP (?) that I'll watch later.

Also, thread title really needs to be changed to something involving being punk'd.

[Kageru]

They're being awfully kind and he spends a lot of time spinning things in a very favorable light. I understand that's just part of being professional and remaining employable but it really is part of the reason failures aren't learned from.

... well, either that or he honestly is delusional. Either way, didn't get a lot out of it.

[UnSub]

Having now watched it, it reinforces some of Luke Halliwell's points, but also that RTW was really just throwing things at a wall to see what stuck. The last 10 minutes sees discussions of how the next step of APB was to start putting out variant servers and see how players respond to those different server types, which seems like an expensive way of trying to work out some simple answers.

[Kageru]

I read the last bit mostly as "we didn't have the money or time to create new zones". Five years of development by a 150+ person team and launching with two action zones is  Obviously they were designed by hand, as are all non-shit zones, and city zones are going to be more complex than open field zones but it's still crap. And the zones they did release still had all sorts of balance issues.

The core problem that came out in the talk really was having one core "visionary", with a console background and who is also simultaneously managing the business, being the focus point of everything. Then again, that might be a lot of the people who were actually tasked with doing game design claiming they were "just following orders". It really would be fascinating as an example of project management failure but that interview didn't give the goods.

They also brushed over the economic fuck ups that let the few people who might have stayed subscribed play for free. If you are going to let people pay their subscription with in game currency you better be damn sure there are controls on how much money is available. Eve has this right because buying gametime with Isk still ends up with CCP getting paid. RTW not only stuffed up that part but also left in game mechanics that let people generate cash AFK and failed to do a targeted rollback (though that's arguable in terms of it also would have lost them subs).

Likewise their suggestion that their "not a MMO" message was garbled is true but misses the point that selling a "subscription" game brings forth the expectation you are going to have MMO levels of depth and variety in your game-play. Not that I believe them on that either. I'm pretty sure the original plan was to have most of the money coming from micro-transactions until they did the numbers and realised they'd spent too much, and would retain too few players, for that to work. Though really they probably would have lasted longer if they'd gone sub-free, and had a lot more room to maneuver. It would have made both the economic screw-ups and a targeted roll back a lot more palatable.

[Margalis]

It'[s kind of sad when people who are creative or visionaries or just good at one thing utterly fail once they become more involved in management and business, a la Jones or Bill Roper.

Happens a lot in startups where at some point the founders are forced out.

[Azazel]

45 minute interview with RTW's EP (?) that I'll watch later.

Also, thread title really needs to be changed to something involving being punk'd.

Be sure and give us the TL:DW on that one. No way am I sitting through a 45min interview with anyone in the games industry.

[Furiously]

45 minute interview with RTW's EP (?) that I'll watch later.

Also, thread title really needs to be changed to something involving being punk'd.

Be sure and give us the TL:DW on that one. No way am I sitting through a 45min interview with anyone in the games industry.

Not even Jade Raymond naked?

[UnSub]

45 minute interview with RTW's EP (?) that I'll watch later.

Also, thread title really needs to be changed to something involving being punk'd.

Be sure and give us the TL:DW on that one. No way am I sitting through a 45min interview with anyone in the games industry.

It's always hard to say with those interviews, especially where the guy is potentially looking for a job. However (in no particular order):

1) He was consulting to RTW on MyWorld and then came on as EP for APB in the months coming up to launch.
2) He apparently was the first person apart from Dave Jones to talk about cutting some features.
3) From his point of view, RTW didn't have a good focus on what APB should offer players - it might be great to have a customisable music program, but perhaps those devs should have been involved in working on the core game instead.
4) RTW ran on a cult of personality around Dave Jones.
5) It was a huge surprise to even APB's EP that RTW only lasted 8 weeks past APB's launch. They thought they had a bit more time.
6) RTW launched APB as much to get out of development as to actually start generating revenue. People were forgetting why certain design decisions had been made which led to internal conflicts.
7) He was let go prior to RTW going into administration.
8) APB's next steps was to start launching different server types - the FFA server, the no-upgrades server, etc - to see what players would gravitate to. I laughed when he announced those plans (because they seemed popular ideas on the forums) but then turned around and scoffed at social network games who might have 1000 players play two different versions of the game and then pick the winning version based on that. The ex-EP didn't seem to get the idea that spending time developing servers that might never reach a critical mass of players was a very expensive way of doing market research (at least social network games are cheap to iterate).

I think those were the main points.

[Mrbloodworth]

Districts, not servers.