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All Points Bulletin: Realtime Worlds Enters Into "Administration"
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Realtime Worlds, developers of All Points Bulletin, has entered "into administration" which has been confirmed by Gamasutra. Entering into administration is indicative of the creditors seizing assets. The matter has not yet been adjudicated in court so it appears it is one step ahead of all-out court ordered bankruptcy.
A staffer for the PR house representing UK-based corporate recovery group Begbies Traynor said in a phone call that the firm is handling Realtime Worlds' administration, confirming reports that originally appeared on UK-based Develop Tuesday morning. An official statement is forthcoming, the rep said.
As administrator, Begbies Traynor will decide whether Realtime Worlds can continue on as a company in light of financial difficulties, or more likely if the studio can recover more money by selling off assets or liquidating entirely.
At this point, Gamasutra is reporting that calls to Realtime execs have not been returned.
Read the full report at Gamasutra.
Update (Thanks, Pyrostasis!) from the APB web site:
As you may or may not have already read, RTW has recently announced that it has entered into administration. When reading this news, you’ll probably be wondering what effect this will have on you, the players.
Well, the good news is that it doesn’t. APB will continue to run, receive updates and is completely accessible. There will be no disruption to the service.
For more information on updates, remember to visit the ‘In Development’ section of the APB forums, as well as follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Comments
Calls haven't been returned because the first assets they seized were the phones
I am so Glad I didn't buy this game now. I had my doubts when they annonced the pay plans. I'm glad I listened to my gut...
I just feel bad for that human avatar guy. Im sure people will see him at like a party or something and be like,
"So why did you decide to dress in such a strange style?"
And he will just sit there in silence for a minute and then respond,
"I got really drunk......."
I'm not suprised by the news personally.I do hope they work something out for fans of this game though.To me it seemd the yput all there eggs in the customisaiton basket hoping that enough people would wna tto play dressup and fashion designer so they could beef up the anemic actual game poriton of the game alter,apparently there wasn't enough
Add that to the fact their business model doesn't seem that well thought out since we see people in other threads saying how eas yit is to make in game money and pay for extra time without giving the devs a cent extra.
What a shame.
It's amazing how these games can go from "looking good" to "going into bankruptcy" or some such thing.
It's to the point that unless you have deep pockets and solid management then you might as well not bother.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
another tanked b/c they didnt listen to beta testers.
This is why I don't play these small MMO games (APB, Darkfall, Vanguard, etc.)---their future in uncertain. I will only trust MMOs that are backed by BIG companies like Blizzard, EA BioWare, etc.
From their website link
"As you may or may not have already read, RTW has recently announced that it has entered into administration. When reading this news, you’ll probably be wondering what effect this will have on you, the players.
Well, the good news is that it doesn’t. APB will continue to run, receive updates and is completely accessible. There will be no disruption to the service.
For more information on updates, remember to visit the ‘In Development’ section of the APB forums, as well as follow us on Twitter and Facebook."
Not sure anyone is buying it though. This rarely leads to continued service.
That has always, been the case..
Ouch.
i agree with honeymoon
.
Kinda suck because every mmo that goes out of the WoW model and try something new seems to go bankrupt and die.Every mmo seems to have the same gameplay nowdays.i yearn for something with more action than waiting for a skill to refresh.Korean devs seems to be heading the right way with games like blade and soul and continent of the ninth but i am not one that gets my hope too high until i try them.
i wish i tryed tabula rasa before it died damn...
The game had many great ideas. And many crappy ones.
Let's play Fallen Earth (blind, 300 episodes)
Let's play Guild Wars 2 (blind, 45 episodes)
i didnt read the whole article. but...
is there nothing they can do? like f2p?
i dont play... but it seems like alot of ppl would go for it.
Whoa, that is sad. I beta'd APB, and thought it was flawed but fun. Not something I'd buy...but fun nonetheless.
As said above, they didn't listen to their Beta Testers much, but that's hardly unusual. I think the payment schme had a lot to do with it, that and the rep it earned for turning a blind eye to aimbotting and hacking.
Administration/recievership doesn't always mean the end of things, but in the case of Realtime - if letting a bunch of employees go didn't stanch the financial bleeding enough, it doesn't look good for APB.
Shame really. I have fond memories of hours spent pimping my ride(s) in the game.
I never expected it to go this fast with this game.
It was clear APB wasn't worth a sub though, it's a fun game at times, but also tremendously annoying and it lacks content.
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!
LOL so I guess you have already forgotten Ascheron's Call 2, Earth and Beyond, and Tabula Rasa.
All games backed by companies with stellar reputations and deep pockets, yet all had the plug pulled.
Frankly its not the company thats backing it that makes a game a win or lose.
IMO so many games are failing these days because of four basic reasons.
1) Limited Vision ( creating the same old game over and over, creativity is dead )
2) Designers not Gamers ( this generation of game designers are cookie cutter tech school lemmings, they learn the same code, from the same books, and are incapable of original thought. The first, and even some of the second generation games were designed by gamer for gamers. You had gamers wanting to take thier paper and pencil vision " real " and so they learned to design games thru trial and error. Creativity and originality were abundent.
3) Money vs the Game, or Investing Managers vs the Players. ( MMOs have become about making money, not about making a quality game, the wrong people are in charge. The Industry has been taken over by investors and business managers, who can not get thier head around the concept that a truly successful mmo is not an mmo that sells a million copies, its an mmo that last a million days. Great game design is not about original box sales and deadlines its about a quality product and retention/expansion of a dedicated player base.
4) Arogance Pride and Stubborn Indifference ( Game Designers have stopped listening to gamers, they think they are smarter than us and better qualified to tell us what a good game is. Much like our governement they think they know what is better for us than we do and they are trying to force it on us even when we tell them we dont want it. )
Frankly until the industry is purged of the business managers and investors, the design tech schools and game designing text books, and the industry obsession with WoW and its success, we are going to continue to get the same crappy games.
Sad but true.
To create an FPS game that doesn't use as much skill as normal FPS games and you have to buy/pay fees for just didn't make sense. Why would you pay any kind of extra money when you can buy a massively huge game like CoD MW2 and play as much as you want without paying more.
Everything about this company's approach and model just didn't make sense. Hopefully this shows companies that you can't take normal games and stick extra fees on the for easy money. We were definetly entering a time where, much like the internet bubble before it, a bunch of people said "Hey we just throw something together and call it an MMO and we make millions, let's do it" This caused a lot of bad models and bad games to be made and now they're all going under. Perhaps this means, like the internet, that going forward we will see more quality stuff to come out and not just everyone thinking MMOs = success and so they keep putting out terrible things.
BTW how long did auto assault last? Is this about to take the record for fastest shut down?
Auto Assaault survived for a little under a year and a half.
I think I have to agree with you on how the companies approach and subscription model didn't make sense. I've seen other posters compare this game to Hellgate London. I don't feel that is exactly true, but they both do seem to fit into your description of games that brought you the same or even less content than their predecessors yet tried to sell it to you in pieces.These kinds of companies remind me of car manufactuers where just about everything that would have been included in the price a decade ago is now an optional extra you have to pay a little more for.
If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, riddle 'em with bullets
http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/feature/2952/page/2
If we don't count Seed, which almost nobody heard of, then it seems like APB takes the title.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
LOL poor seed it actually had something special.
You can't just make a game these days, you have to make a game with a sustainable revenue stream.
This game never had a chance, they spent far too much money on it without ever figuring out how they were going to get a return on their investment.
As to the investors, they deserve to lose their money for being foolish enough to sink money into a project with no obvious way to return a profit.
Once assets get seized, how long do you think they can continue maintaining the game? If you guessed not long, you are probably right.
And another game bites the dust.
By the time the game was in beta, it was wayyy too late. From all I've seen, the game is tanking because it was very poorly planned out from the start. It's like they hoped some sort of gameplay would magically emerge, but ended up with this barebones little city environment with nothing to do in it.
That's what a lot of reviewers panned it for, more than the imbalances and such that the players (who at least tried to stick with it) complained about. No amount of beta tweaking was going to make up for badly mismanaged and squandered resources. There just isn't enough game there to even fix.
I'm sure Toxico and co. will keep trying to spin things as best they can, up until the very end, though.
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
You guys are all assuming the game is closing. The company went into forced Administration (bankruptcy - Think Delta Airlines--- has it closed?). This just means that the company needs to stop its creditors because of the lower sales then they expected at launch.
APB is a good game and has a solid community, it just didn't make the 50 million they wanted it to out of the gate.
The game is not going to close, it may switch to free to play but it is one of the most solid shooters on the market that can hold its own to Gunz, Soldier Front, Etc.
This game was published by EA. Unfortunately, this game suffered from too many creative ideas and not enough follow through to substance. This does not mean that the game was too creative or too ambitious, it certainly was neither, rather these ideas didn't end up having a very substantial form which culminated in the game seeming to be anything but finished when it hit retail. Truth be told, All Points Bulletin is like a gangster version of dollhouse and in it you can create most any look that you want...so long as you just want to play dress up and not a MMORPG.
No matter how you look at it this game just was not cut out to launch and maybe that's what we're seeing here, the logical result of an inferior product being released and the fallout that has to happen in a situation like this. When you let greed drive your car you're going to crash, unless you have the same insurance plans as Blizzard and NCSoft.
(1)TL:DR must be your way of saying that thinking hurts. Then again, this may explain why it looks like you responded to the post without using your brain.
(2) It's not about community, is it? You just have nothing better to do.