We've finally gone public -- Project MyWorld

Damn man, that's just awful

Guess it was kinda in the air, 5 years for a company that big with no titles on the side (after 06 at least) is definitely also having all the eggs in one basket. To be honest then I find it surprising that there's not more MMO companies that bow under like this, seems like an extremely tough market. Guess APB had buzz because it wasn't your average fantasy RPG, too bad that wasn't helping.

I have two friends t hat play APB on a regular basis and they are going to pack in their subscription soon they said. And the only thing they want to keep them interested in playing is some new content. I haven't played it myself but from what they've said there isn't really a great deal to do once you max out.

What I think was awesome from stories of APB though was the customisation. One of my mates told me he made a van with swastikas all over it with the words "Dial nein nein nein for nazy" on the bonnet haha. The GM's removed it for "violation".

Man RT was not what came to mind when you thought of places about to go under. I had high hopes for APB but beyond all the custom stuff it had a lot of issues.

That sucks. So what are you going to do now/where are you going to go, Defrag?

Were you by any chance one of those hired back?

http://www.1up.com/news/realtime-worlds ... upport-apb

Good to hear, and good luck man, fickle situation you're in!

wtf man! :X Good luck getting your shit together dude. But it sure is weird firing and hiring people again? :neutral: I don't know if I would want to work for that company again, unless I don't have another choice.

?

[Blocked Image: http://developer.valvesoftware.com/w/images/3/3b/Breen.jpg]

Our recruiter here told me yesterday he's going to RTW today to see about picking up some of the talent there. Maybe you want to talk to him?

There's an interesting article on the Guardian about this here and I also found a interesting insight in the comment section.

Quote from CodeMan

I used to work on APB too, and I thought I'd add a few things. (Disclaimer: Everything I say is my personal opinion based on observations from my point of view and may not be 100% correct.)Regarding development, there were several reasons why development was extremely slow and we often failed to work on things that made sense.

First of all, we did all the important stuff last. If you want people to play your game, customization should be secondary. Why did we have customizable cars, a music editor, and customizable death tunes before we had a game?

The fact is, we made a huge, slow system with no game design, and subsequently tried to experiment with different designs on this monstrosity, while under time pressure to finish the game. We would spend significant time implementing a game design, realize that it didn't work, and subsequently change it. I don't know off the top of my head what would have been the best way to iterate on different designs, but the way we did it feels to me like the worst possible way.

The UI was changed at least a dozen times in the course of the project. They kept changing their minds whether or not they wanted health bars, stamina bars, a radar, a map, and so on.

People complain about the simplicity of the AI entities, but what they don't know is that much of what they see was added in the last year of development. A year before launch, you couldn't even kill the living city pedestrians. You could literally drive through and walk through them, by design. The original justification was that we don't plan on making GTA, we're making a different kind of game. The so called open world activities, along with notoriety and heat, were added fairly late in the game.

Regarding the failure of APB, we did feel this coming at some level. Personally I began looking for other jobs months before APB launched, and I wasn't the only one. (As a non-EU citizen on a work permit, I'm very much screwed if I lose my job in the UK without a backup plan, so I had to be careful.) Regardless of the success or failure of APB, there was no real plan for what would happen after the launch of APB. Sure, there were some wild ideas thrown about like creating a Zombies district, and suggestions of various patches, but these didn't emerge until a few months before release and were never very well thought through. This sort of thing raised red flags for me that the game wasn't being managed very well; they hadn't even thought about what would happen after they launched!

One often asked question is "How did you guys think you could launch a game with such poor driving and shooting". The fact is, APB had serious performance issues until just a couple months before launch. Bad shooting mechanics, unresponsive driving, and problem that the combat doesn't feel very solid, these were all blamed on the performance. This is understandable, given that at the worst times the client was running at 10-15 fps on the best systems, and the server was running at as low as 3-5 fps on heavy user loads.

I wasn't around for Crackdown, but what I was told was that Crackdown was slow and not fun at all until they optimized it and it became fun. We expected the same for APB: We imagined that the game would feel much smoother once the framerates hit 30 or higher.

When we finally got around to optimizing APB (much later than we should have), optimizations exposed the fact that the combat and driving were still problematic, but at that point it was too late to change anything: We had reached the code-complete stage. Optimization was more or less the last code change we did, and anything other code changes before launch were considered too risky by production.

Did we know the game sucked before launch? Yes and No. There were different mindsets about the company.

Personally, I always felt that the design of the game was lacking. I couldn't imagine how the game would succeed when its only strong point was customization. I did express when I joined why I felt the game design was lacking. I mentioned the bad vehicle handling several times during my time at RTW. Many of us did. But we trusted the experience of the higher-ups, I remember thinking to myself that maybe my negativity is why Dave Jones is a millionaire and I'm not.

One problem leading up to launch was that most people on the team weren't willing to express any negative feelings about the game. In my opinion, there was a great deal of "team spirit", too much perhaps. You see, on the beta forums, there were many players that were very vocal on explaining why the game wasn't fun. Some were extremely constructive. For the most part, these individuals were brutally torn up by the APB fan base and forum moderators. Many threads were closed, and people with negative comments about the game were branded "trolls". Not many brave souls on the team were willing to stand up and agree with these trolls.

At APB and company presentations, management went out and cherry-picked only positive comments from forums to share with the development team. At one such meeting, one team member actually stood up and expressed concerned about the dismissive attitude displayed toward APB's criticism, and received a "don't worry" response. There was a culture of emailing around only positive previews and reviews of the game. I got the feeling that many people were in a state of denial, though the fact that the denial got stronger as the criticism for APB got worse indicated that people were aware at some level that all was not well. At some point it became so blatant that I joked about the similarity to the "Baghdad Bob" situation.

But for the most part, most of us did feel at some level that the game sucked. We knew that some people would love the game for what it is, and we knew that some people would hate it for its design and technical shortcomings. What we didn't know, and what some people in management should have tried to find out, was what percentage of our customers would love it and what percentage would hate it. Instead of doing proper research, management just went by the forums and Youtube comments. However, as you can imagine, these would be a bit biased. People that liked APB would stick around the forums and give praise endlessly, while people that hated it would make their criticisms, get told off for "trolling", and subsequently leave, never posting again. We should have done statistical analysis on how many people like the game, rather than anecdotal or qualitative analysis.

Speaking of market research, another major problem with RTW was that it tried to do EVERYTHING by itself. After breaking apart from Webzen, the feeling was that "We have money, we don't have a publisher breathing down our back, so we can relax and do everything the way we want to." Deciding to use EA as a publisher happened later, and billing was outsourced at the last minute when we discovered we couldn't do that ourselves. Everything else, things like marketing, PR, and customer support, we tried to do ourselves. Management literally didn't think of a proper plan for marketing and advertising until it was too late, which is why so many people had simply never heard of APB when it launched.

PR for the game was ridiculously horrible throughout the project life cycle, probably because we didn't have a PR team. Public misunderstanding about APB ran wild and unchecked, with nobody bothering to address the confusion. For the longest time, RTW never even bothered to tell people that we don't plan on making a 360 version. (How could we? We spent man-months trying to get the memory from around 2.2 GB to under 2 GB so that the game wouldn't crash on 32-bit operating systems. To imagine that we could get it down to the 512 MB available on the XBox 360 without re-engineering the entire codebase is absurd.)

We told people there wouldn't be a subscription, but then announced a payment system that was effectively a subscription for most players (which by the way, many of us inside the company resented as well). Then there was the issue with voice ads which we nevered bothered to tell people about until they discovered it for themselves. Given that the revenue from voice ads is very minimal, this move served no other purpose than to create public discontent just days before launch. Finally, there was the review embargo at launch, which many people saw as a way to sell as many copies of the game before reviews revealed how bad the game was. This was followed by Dave Jones's interview in which he expressed that people had too high expectations of the game and that they were playing wrong, which of course didn't help APB at all.

Regardless of all of this, however, we were all shocked to see MyWorld take the hit for APB's failure, and of course the way the company closed without any real warning was horrid. It's a shame that they never bothered to tell their own employees that they weren't going to have money to pay them.

Display More

Quote

This was followed by Dave Jones's interview in which he expressed that people had too high expectations of the game and that they were playing wrong, which of course didn't help APB at all.

lmao. You're playing it wrong! Oh man, genius.

Interesting insights, thanks for sharing!

The scary thing is that i remember reading similar things about RTW already two or three years ago. I think it was on that one website where everybody in the games industry can rate his company.

It's a secret!

Quote

While there’s no news on APB, the BBC broke news yesterday that the administrators of Realtime Worlds have found a buyer for MyWorld. Staff had been kept on MyWorld in hope of them doing exactly that, so you have to chalk this up in the pro column for them. Who’s the buyer? It’s a secret. “One hundred per cent confidentiality has been imposed by the company.” said the administrators about this mysterious American company, “MyWorld has been sold and unfortunately we cannot disclose any further details of the sale.” Who is it? Well, the obvious guess would be someone working in the social-networking sphere though sources speaking exclusively inside our heads tell us it’s the Bavarian Illuminanti. We must ignore the voices, else we kill again.

Aye thanks for sharing, does indeed sound like a mess, and not surprising that the game ended up like this based on that. Too bad really, the broad concept of APB is really cool.