APB: How To Blow $100,000,000.00

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.

[rroded]

crazy

sad it flopped tho I'm sure hopping in and out of bed with ms didn't help. Still that's a lot of monkeys typing at keyboards... What the hell was the management too busy stuffing their pockets ta care? I mean they put 100 mil into one game n ended up with apb more flash than gameplay..

[0mega4]

but they should have tried to hold back from being pressured by microsoft to rush there titles as microsoft additionally would never give the studio a definitive answer to wether or not they wanted it on the xbox

bad decisions on the studios part with there partnership with microsoft that brought this studio to its knees

& btw to whoever did crackdown 2 instead Realtime Worlds

i think anyone could have made a better crackdown 2

[evrfighter]

woweeeee

well the video game world needed a few more "here's what NOT to do" examples.

I can't believe how little they listened to the beta testers. I looked forward to this game for YEARS. WTF. I played the demo for less than an hour before I decided I wasn't buying it.

[sack_boi]

lol

[solar]

it was released before it was finished. it's a daggar in the heart of any MMO if it is released with massive bugs, unbalanced weapons, and glitches.

[MicroSony4Life]

while we are at it lets blame MS for the BP oil spill, the PS3 Jail Break, the floods in the middle east, Lebron James leaving Cleveland, HHG gamers website.

Stop being a f@nboy for one day and enjoy both consoles.

[BlackBusterCritic]

I say that, even though I did enjoy their game. But the problem with Crackdown, is that its only fun for the initial 10 hours, and even with the Keys to the City DLC, it gets repetitive and boring. But the time spent enjoying it was definitely fun. I just wish the sequel had more improvements made (I know they didnt make the sequel). But the same applies to APB. They made a game with great elements of customization, but on the gameplay department, its only fun for the first 10 hours, and after that, its the same thing over and over again. And with a monthly subscription business model, that doesnt cut it.

[ndibu]

See what happens when you abandon microsoft?
PSJailBreak is a Microsoft funded product.*¥

*Disclaimer: this is in fact not true but only a joke not meant to be taken seriously.
¥ Please do not sue me Microsoft.

[kasasensei]

Epic fail

[RIPSKATEDESTROY]

i wished this game would do goooood! i really did, then i got into the beta and quickly found out that the only thing really good with it was the customization part of it!

[RememberThe357]

Them? I could understand Infinity Ward or a Rockstar studio, but Realtime Worlds? I think not. They, in no way, have proven themselves capable of making a game that can even make that amount of money, much less make more.

Oh hey, looks like they published the game themselves. So they're the morons who gave themselves 100 million dollars to make a game that was completely worthless other then the customization.

[RIPSKATEDESTROY]

think its based on the fact that its david jones company

[Nihilism]

MMO's have like a 75% failure rate, the only reason they keep trying is because WoW is an example of what's possible when you go all out.

I personally hate MMO's. I wish we had Kotor 3 and Warcraft 4 already...

[RememberThe357]

But you are spot on.

[r1sh12]

yep...
All MMO's suck, because they get stuck with the technology they were built for and never improve.
Franchises do so much better and KOTOR 1 & 2 were good games.
I dont know why they wanted to make KOTOR into an MMO, WTF?
KOTOR 1 has to be one of my favourite RPG's of all time, it was a well thoughtout and made, with a good and solid story line.
It was really entertaining, I even played it twice so I could get both endings done legit.

[maruyuki]

i didn't see any ads for this game at all.
they should have done what activision did
25 mil on the actual game and 75 on advertising.

damn... like... they didn't even advertise this game at all lol

[r1sh12]

hahah I was on the beta. I played it for 3 hours and was like what is this?
Its a terrible game trying to make the GTA IV gametype called cops n crooks into a MMO.
No one would want this piece of ....

[yoshiro]

damn naughty dog with 100M that would be...

[Lekumkee]

5 Triple-A games, and money left over to fund smaller projects.

[AlienFodder]

Sounds like another Alpha Protocol failure, except with a lot more money involved... Yet another bitter employee from a developer has decided it was necessary to spill the beans on what went wrong. And it seems to me that there were some fairly similar issues at play for both games.

[DeeBee]

I think it's good that "bitter employees" come out of the woodwork and spill the beans on why a game, released by the company they work for, fails. At least this way we get a more accurate view on what happened, instead of the widely accepted "Piracy ruined the game" rhetoric that the heads of the company constantly spew forth.

[Darrius Cole]

I agree the more we know about what went wrong the more things can be done to stop it from happening again.

[Matthew94]

did they put the .00 just to make it look bigger? desperate for hits

[troncoparati]

Greed is the key factor behind this failure. Free to play with micro-transactions is the way of the future. Molyneux has been pushing this idea hard since the first Fable and look what it did with LittleBigPlanet.

[Darrius Cole]

Someone had to be stealing here. 100,000,000 whether it is dollars, pound, or euros, is too much to money spent for a game that had practically no advertising, and reportedly low production values.

This sounds similar to Ninja Theory claiming that Heavenly Sword didn't make a profit even though it sold 1.5 million copies. A company with bad or dishonest management is not going to survive no matter how many games they sell or how much money they have.

[DrillaKid]

Im pretty sure NT are talking crap, i mean 1.5m*£40=£56m(~$90m) (obviously thats a very rough calculation). There is no way HS cost that much to develop.