How the hell did APB Cost 100 Million dollars???!

[blockblack 91]

I today found out that APB Costed 100 Million dollars to make, But how the hell did it cost all of that? This is kinda impossible since 70% of it's codes are corrupted, I mean a 5 Million Dollars game has a better coding and game-play and Quality, So how did this happen to APB? Why it's budget is very un-real? I doubt APB Costed less than 5 Million dollars to make actually.

[Queen of Love 453]

Consider that the map was planned by real architteture studios, in theory could builded in real with maximal benefit for living people.

plus APB was (and still is) an inovattive software with features unique never tested before.

 

edit:150M

Edited August 3, 2019 by Queen of Love
expansive but still alive and nice to play.

[vsb 6171]

mismanagement 

 

edit: for a more in-depth read

https://lukehalliwell.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/where-realtime-worlds-went-wrong/

 

 

Edited August 3, 2019 by Glaciers
edit

[BIank 109]

Pretty sure that was the total amount of money invested into RTW, not APB specifically

Edited August 3, 2019 by BIank

[iRawwwN 282]

$100 million wasn't just straight to develop APB afaik, it was put towards other stuff as well. With that being said, back in 2009 APB was well ahead of it's time. Think GTA V, it came out in 2013 and development started in 2008. APB's concept was WAY ahead of the curve. GTA is it's own spin on the whole crime thing, but APB done things very well. Not well enough for the mainstream though sadly.

 

APB was a concept back in something like 2005 while RTW was developing Crackdown on Xbox 360. (i loved the crackdown art style and lore, it's why I love apb so much too) There was a lot of money being pumped around during the RTW time for different titles. 

 

With that being said, poor management was a major factor in wasting that $100 mill. 

Edited August 3, 2019 by iRawwwN

[Progeekzy 8]

Ya alot of that had to do with real time worlds, the original makers of the game. They hired out of office coders for some of the game features, then had to hire other coders to figure out how to put it all together. In the end it was like a puzzle you had to put together with a hammer. THen it was held together with duct tape. Thats why G1 had such a hard time adding/fixing/editing code. It was a mess. 

[CookiePuss 5378]

I like to imagine lots of hookers and blow. 

[Fasalina 163]

13 minutes ago, Progeekzy said:

Ya alot of that had to do with real time worlds, the original makers of the game. They hired out of office coders for some of the game features, then had to hire other coders to figure out how to put it all together. In the end it was like a puzzle you had to put together with a hammer. THen it was held together with duct tape. Thats why G1 had such a hard time adding/fixing/editing code. It was a mess. 

Weird tho huh, UML (Unified Modeling Language) did exist back then. :^) 

[Ohshii 215]

Excessive vacations, overpaying employees and greasing hands. They had devs in multiple locations all working on the game and they didn't communicate very well with each other. Hence why some parts of the game are properly made and others arent but when put together causes all kinds of bugs. (like cars flying, etc). I know 2 guys who worked in an office in South Korea that worked on APB, they said their managers were guys in India who didn't have direct access to their work, but regardless they was their bosses. There was also an Australian office that did some of the assets as well. The rest was UK and Ireland I believe. 

 

I worked for K2 Networks from 06 to 10, including during the merger with G1. In my time there, they used the same South Korean studio to make a bunch of the assets for War Rock, MU Online, Sword 2, Knight Online and APB. The entire time I was there, G1 had 0 in-house coders, programmers, or any type of developers at all in their Irvine, CA office contrary to popular belief. They still worked with the Ireland office but they also had the South Korean office and at one point during CBT they also got helped from I want to say either an Indian or Australian office to work on some assets also.. aaaand it cost a shitload of money to pay them all. They'd do EXACTLY what they was told to do and nothing more or less. They also didnt QA ANY of their code, they just did what was told of them. So K2/G1 had to QA their own stuff in house in Irvine which was an absolute clusterfuck and nightmare, send the code back to Korea/Ireland/India/Aussieville, get it changed, and sent back. The delays were long, the work hours was long and tedious and the results were very sub-par at best. And more than all of that, it was exceptionally expensive - but still cheaper than hiring American in-house devs because back in 05-08 with games like WoW blowing up, the cost of hiring American dev's was overwhelmingly expensive.

 

Remember they changed the game like 2-3 times before it became RTW's APB. GTA Online, Crackdown Online, and like 1-2 other games. Every single time they changed projects they had to scrap some stuff, keep some stuff, hire/fire/rehire employees, etc. It was just a massively expensive project that barely got released in the end.

 

Fun fact if Rockstar didn't back out around 60% of the original creation of the game, it'd of cost less than 30 million and would've been released as GTA Online. Too bad Rockstar didn't believe online gameplay would've been successful so they bailed last minute. Also the contract with Webzen from what I remember cost an absolute shitload of money. It was originally supposed to be for the XBox 360 only, so reporting the entire game to PC was a pretty big undertaking. Davey Jones didn't want it to be a half-patootie port, so they were forced to recreate almost all of the entire back end. It's like when Diablo 3 came out for console, almost 80% of the entire game had to be completely remade which is why D4 for console cost more to make than D4 for PC. (I worked at Blizzard for almost 15 years.)

 

Also for the record, RTW had 0 security in APB. Every single cheat, triggerbot, etc worked. Everything. Even outdated cheats. They had literally 0 anti-cheat measures in place. I don't want to say everybody cheated in RTW, but if you think APB:R was bad under G1, you have no idea how bad it was for RTW. That';s why when people talk about how great RTW's APB was, I laugh in their faces cus it's a flat out bullshoot story. RTW APB was massively unbalanced, guns took forever to kill, and the vast majority of the top tier players were all cheating.

 

Yay for working in the video game industry! ^^

 

Edited August 3, 2019 by Ohshii

[Darkzero3802 611]

37 minutes ago, iRawwwN said:

$100 million wasn't just straight to develop APB afaik, it was put towards other stuff as well. With that being said, back in 2009 APB was well ahead of it's time. Think GTA V, it came out in 2013 and development started in 2008. APB's concept was WAY ahead of the curve. GTA is it's own spin on the whole crime thing, but APB done things very well. Not well enough for the mainstream though sadly.

 

APB was a concept back in something like 2005 while RTW was developing Crackdown on Xbox 360. (i loved the crackdown art style and lore, it's why I love apb so much too) There was a lot of money being pumped around during the RTW time for different titles. 

 

With that being said, poor management was a major factor in wasting that $100 mill. 

APB could easily be mainstream if only things were fixed and hackers didn't control the game. G1 sure did a good job didnt they :^)

[Mitne 724]

Didn't they gone through redesigning twice before releasing it?

[CookiePuss 5378]

1 minute ago, Darkzero3802 said:

APB could easily be mainstream if only things were fixed and hackers didn't control the game. G1 sure did a good job didnt they :^)

They kept a game that was never popular and not the kind of game that ever appealed to the vast majority of gamers, alive for years. 

 

[Darkzero3802 611]

3 minutes ago, CookiePuss said:

They kept a game that was never popular and not the kind of game that ever appealed to the vast majority of gamers, alive for years. 

 

They money grabbed a game for yrs instead of updating it, fixing it and doing what should have been done to make it popular with a healthy playerbase.

[neophobia 216]

10 minutes ago, Darkzero3802 said:

APB could easily be mainstream if only things were fixed and hackers didn't control the game. G1 sure did a good job didnt they :^)

and those could easily be fixed and hackers easily control the game right :^)

31 minutes ago, Fasalina said:

Weird tho huh, UML (Unified Modeling Language) did exist back then. :^) 

because UML prevents shitty coding :^)

 

[claude 223]

RTW APB was meant to be a game that pushed limits super hard, and blow everything out of the water. With rapid advancements in the tech/software industry, it's easy for projects that are only 2 years old to become completely replaced and almost obsolete due to a newer and more developed product.

 

The game (back then) was way ahead of it's time, but it just wasn't managed properly or pushed properly. the 100,000,000 meme is thrown around a lot, and honestly, I have no idea if it's accurate at all or where the figure came from in the first place, but with how much it cost Rockstar to make GTA V, I don't find it too crazy or Farfetched if 100M was actually put into the game.

Edited August 3, 2019 by claude

[mattskoii 67]

Well we all remember Crackdown on the XBOX 360 which was 1 of RTW's games and that what gave the company the kickstarter with the development of APB but overall there was a lack of management seeing how complex APB became despite it's unique customization concept so really RTW dug their own grave with the poor choices made.

[Ohshii 215]

Also in RTW, the game was under NDA for the entire time until it was released. It had next to no press, I have no idea why Davey Jones was so animate about not having anyone try the game and review it. So when it was released the playerbase was dismal at best. Every single person I talked to about APB had never heard of it. A game where at the time was one of the most expensive games ever made, no one had heard of. APB was destined to fail since before it was ever released unfortunately.

[CookiePuss 5378]

Crazy that APB still makes the list.. 

 

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop

[Hexerin 1140]

I always wonder how that figure would change if they were to update it to include the expenditures that Gamersfirst/Reloaded and Little Orbit have spent.

[NotZombieBiscuit 3146]

APB didn't cost 100million.

 

That 100million was for RTW over a combined number of projects. They had roughly 3 projects running at the same time as APB.

 

People always conflate the two together.

[Nitronik 348]

1 hour ago, blockblack said:

I today found out that APB Costed 100 Million dollars to make, But how the hell did it cost all of that? This is kinda impossible since 70% of it's codes are corrupted, I mean a 5 Million Dollars game has a better coding and game-play and Quality, So how did this happen to APB? Why it's budget is very un-real? I doubt APB Costed less than 5 Million dollars to make actually.

First off : The 100 million figure was the total capital amassed by RTW at the time. They were working on two projects - the other being "Project MyWorld" which is what got them the most funding

The problem with RTW APB is that the company was mismanaged to hell. Every single opportunity to waste money, or to waste time - which meant wasting money - was something RTW jumped on. They tried to be corporate, and failed extremely hard

[Ohshii 215]

23 minutes ago, NotZombieBiscuit said:

APB didn't cost 100million.

 

That 100million was for RTW over a combined number of projects. They had roughly 3 projects running at the same time as APB.

 

People always conflate the two together.

 

Wasn't MyWorld the only other game they was working on? According to Wikipedia it was like 3 million USD. That's nothing when the budget was 100 million.

 

RTW hemorrhaged money due to mismanagement. Davey Jones back then was hailed as literally the greatest Developer of all-time. He made GTA and Crackdown and everyone knew his past projects had already yielded like a billion dollars therefore he could "do no wrong". Turns out they was wrong and he fucked up a metric shitload.

 

Proof:

https://lukehalliwell.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/where-realtime-worlds-went-wrong/

 

Enjoy the read lol

Edited August 3, 2019 by Ohshii

[Lato 188]

im gonna be a 12 yo and say OOF

[Darkzero3802 611]

1 hour ago, neophobia said:

and those could easily be fixed and hackers easily control the game right :^)

If G1 gave the slightest shit yes it could have easily been fixed.

[CookiePuss 5378]

Still fun reads...

 

http://brokentoys.org/2010/08/20/apb-how-to-blow-100000000-00/

 

http://t-machine.org/index.php/2010/08/18/one-hundred-meelleon-dollar-wasted-on-rtwapb/

 

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/08/16/redundancies-at-real-time-worlds/#comment-491791

 

 

 

Edited August 3, 2019 by CookiePuss