Develop: What was the mood in the studio when it was decided that APB wasn’t going to be developed for the Xbox 360 and PS3?
RW: Well there never was a definitive decision made in regards to the home consoles. Development started as PC-oriented and, at a point where we had enough resources to compile our own console team, we decided to dedicate our talent on the PC game to make it that much better.
Honestly from my experience, as someone who plays PC and console games, I had strong concerns that the game we were making for PC wasn’t going to be viable on console. We would want to do some things to make the game much more console-centric.
GamesIndustry: "Studio growth is risky - Bizarre Creations, Avalanche, Realtime Worlds and more help uncover the success and pitfalls of rapid expansion."
Just like the music industry, success can a hard thing to come by in video games. Some developers who stumble upon a blockbuster manage to turn one success into another and pump out hit after hit. Others simply spend years slogging it out with low-budget or licensed titles for no reward. One-hit wonders, however, crack the big-time just once, nailing a product everyone remembers but failing to ever reach those giddy heights again.
Omg I am shocked they put Berzerk from the Atari 2600 on there. I love that game, it was so much fun.
As a kid, that game scared the crap outta me. I only played it when I wanted to NOT play Centipede or Joust(and I ALWAYS wanted to play them). And when I did, I could only play a few levels before I was freaked out.
It was a secondhand copy without the manual, and I have no idea how I figured out how to play, but somehow I did, and somehow I enjoyed it while I was terrified.
More recently Spiderman Shattered Dimensions was awesome too. The Activision saw the money and told those guys that they would be making Spiderman games from now on. A year later they released Edge of Time which bombed in sales and in reviews. Now because of Activision's broken system, the same developer has 8 months to put out the next Spiderman game which also looks like complete ass.
The same thing happened with the guys who made Transformers War for Cybertron, a year to make the next game (which was ass) and now because of that they have only a year to make Fall of Cybertron which more then likely will be ass but we will have to wait and see about that one. Activision will close these 2 studios in the next 12 months.
From DevilsMMO:
'It occurs to me that the MMO, as it currently stands in the industry, is something of a hit and miss affair. The average gamer, equipped with a console and every shooter ever made, generally only ever hears about the very biggest MMOs or, failing that, the MMOs that manage to crash and burn the hardest.
This was brought back home to me last week when I received a comment on one of my articles in which the commenter believed most MMOs are destined to fail, and fail quickly. Rather than take that statement at face value, I’ve been thinking through why that would be; what makes a game that has had thousands of hours of development hours plugged into it just fail?'
