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

[Mitne 724]

1 hour ago, Darkzero3802 said:

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.

Yeah. This who praise old G1 are lunatics. They killed every game they could get hands on - before of course milking it off cash. This time APB seemed to be too much of burden though.

[Haganu 105]

Dave Jones (the creator of APB) was more or less revered in the studios as a visionary, much like say Steve Jobs.

Things tend to go wrong when a visionary type person doesn't have people around to keep the expenses down.

 

TL;DR as posted before, pretty much mismanagement is what racked up the expenses and eventually killed the studios.

Edited August 3, 2019 by Haganu
i wonder how many dollars were wasted trying to maintain apb reloaded

[TheMessiah 430]

 

[DragonKnight 0]

4 hours ago, Glaciers said:

mismanagement 

 

edit: for a more in-depth read

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

 

 

Good read.

[KillerTurtle15 4]

I think I remember hearing that a good chunk of APB's initial cost had gone into advertising

I'm pretty sure it was an analysis on the game's downward trend

[neophobia 216]

13 hours ago, Darkzero3802 said:

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

of course, because what a company with a 100m investment and oversized staff cant do, a small patootie company could do with an investment of "the slightest shit".

yes yes.

 

issues that even a multi million company can't fix to customer satisfaction - hint hint, it's producing two of the most successful games in the industry and just at this point in time got over 120million dollars for an ongoing tournament, banned millions of cheaters yet people still claim it is being "controlled" by them.

it's not like g1 also tried 2 anticheats that were SotA - or considered that by the players, whined for and then claimed to be shit once they were implemented...

Edited August 4, 2019 by neophobia

[Ohshii 215]

Imagine trying to build something. Lets use a car for example.

 

It's a 100% new car with all new specs so everything has to be drawn out to scale 100%.

 

Then imagine a group in say, India, creating the entire engine block and bay's specs, but the actual engine is made in Australia.

 

Then the overall body design is made in Scotland but actually made in Korea.

 

Then the transmission is designed in Australia but it's actually made in Scotland.

 

And the interior is designed in Ireland but made in India.

 

And the paint and extra stuff is designed in the United States but is actually made in India, Scotland, Australia, Korea and the UK.

 

And no body talks to each other, not once. You cant ask anybody from a different location a single question. Nothing. No matter what. You just have to assume the translations of the blueprints you were given were exactly correct and you have to blindly hope everything will just work out on it's own. 100% blind faith. They all finish their parts and mail 3/4ths of it to Scotland and a quarter of it to the UK for them to compile and make it all fit into a single car even tho the UK office and the Ireland office have never talked to each other. And before the final result is given, every single person involved gets multiple pay raises, weeks and sometimes month+ long vacations, constant bonuses and are only given the good news and never the bad news. Also no one is allowed to QA the product or review the product as they have such a strict NDA on the car that anyone who says anything about it will get either sued or issued an immediate cease and desist order. What do you think will be the outcome in the end?

 

RTW's All Points Bulletin. 

Edited August 5, 2019 by Ohshii
Changed Ireland to Scotland, ty for correcting me Seedy

[Darkzero3802 614]

On 8/3/2019 at 3:49 PM, Mitne said:

Yeah. This who praise old G1 are lunatics. They killed every game they could get hands on - before of course milking it off cash. This time APB seemed to be too much of burden though.

APB still lives on today. It has a loyal fanbase and could have gone places but G1 didnt give 2 shits and milked it instead. Thats a big difference then too much of a burden.

15 hours ago, neophobia said:

of course, because what a company with a 100m investment and oversized staff cant do, a small patootie company could do with an investment of "the slightest shit".

yes yes.

 

issues that even a multi million company can't fix to customer satisfaction - hint hint, it's producing two of the most successful games in the industry and just at this point in time got over 120million dollars for an ongoing tournament, banned millions of cheaters yet people still claim it is being "controlled" by them.

it's not like g1 also tried 2 anticheats that were SotA - or considered that by the players, whined for and then claimed to be shit once they were implemented...

Cause not updating your anti cheat frequently and not actively patrolling your servers with GMs will really make an anti cherat effective. There are layers put in place to catch hackers and G1 never put the time into doing that, while LO hasnt done so either to date.

[neophobia 216]

6 hours ago, Darkzero3802 said:

Cause not updating your anti cheat frequently and not actively patrolling your servers with GMs will really make an anti cherat effective. There are layers put in place to catch hackers and G1 never put the time into doing that, while LO hasnt done so either to date.

i dont think it would've been g1s job to find signatures. (plus with ff that's not a thing)

patrolling with GMs? which company exactly does that? which one of the size of g1/lo specifically?

you can hardly employ 9 minimum wage guys and expect them to do a good job there either. less wouldn't work out even if you just get them in during peak hours.

 

and as i said, you might be thinking of yourself as an ac expert but - even valve gets frequent complaints about cheaters. and none of their games is "ran by cheaters" and so isn't apb. goats cheat epidemic was a situation where it actually was pretty much ran but that's late g1 and i'd claim LO wouldnt let something like that happen.

[CookiePuss 5382]

4 hours ago, neophobia said:

i dont think it would've been g1s job to find signatures. (plus with ff that's not a thing)

patrolling with GMs? which company exactly does that? which one of the size of g1/lo specifically?

you can hardly employ 9 minimum wage guys and expect them to do a good job there either. less wouldn't work out even if you just get them in during peak hours.

 

and as i said, you might be thinking of yourself as an ac expert but - even valve gets frequent complaints about cheaters. and none of their games is "ran by cheaters" and so isn't apb. goats cheat epidemic was a situation where it actually was pretty much ran but that's late g1 and i'd claim LO wouldnt let something like that happen.

Dark just talks. Everything he suggests is just vague nonsense. He doesn't actually know anything about that which he speaks. 

[RegenanceE 3]

That's some bullshoot, Star Citizen has raised above 200million and see what they've done so far. There are plenty of games that released by the time APB got released to F2P and even in CBT and when was a paid game, The game just seem to be a work of beginner developers whom just scripted a game with weird vehicle handling, Autistic Physics and I assume that so far more and more games are adopting that creative customization.. So nothing is special about this game, just broken and needs much more attention.

[CookiePuss 5382]

Going to repost the exRTW post this time instead of the link...

 

What a fucking mess. I’m ex-RTW.

An outcome like this wasn’t desired by anyone at RTW, but game development is a weird business. A game can play poorly right up until only a few months before release, for a variety of reasons – Crackdown was awful right up until a month or two before it came out (some would say awful afterwards, too, but I’m trying to make a point :). Knowing this, it can blind you to a game’s imperfections – or lead you to think it’s going to come right by release. You end up in this situation where you’re heads down working your patootie off, not well able to critically assess your own product. APB itself only really came together technically relatively late in its development cycle (and it still obviously has problems), leaving too little time for content production and polish, and lacking any real quality in some of its core mechanics (shooting / driving). It’s not that the team was unaware of these huge issues, but a million little things conspire to prevent you from being able to do anything about them. It can seem difficult to comprehend, it certainly was for me before entering the industry – ‘How did those idiots get X wrong in game Y?’. No team sets out to ship something anything less than perfection, but projects can evolve in ways that no one seems to be in total control of. All that said, it was pretty clear to me that the game was going to get a kicking at review – the gap between expectation and the reality was huge. I wasn’t on the APB team, so I played it infrequently, during internal test days etc. I was genuinely shocked when I played the release candidate – I couldn’t believe Dave J would be willing to release this. All the issues that had driven me nuts about it were still there – the driving was poor (server-authoritative with no apparent client prediction, ergo horrendously lag intolerant), combat impact-less, and I found the performance of the game sub-par on what was a high-spec dev machine.

But the real killer, IMO, is the business model. This was out of the team’s hands. The game has issues, but I think if you separate the business model from the game itself, it holds up at least a little better. A large scale team based shooter, in big urban environments, with unprecedented customisation and some really cool, original features. The problem was that management looked at the revenue they wanted to generate and priced accordingly, failing to realise (or care) that there are literally a dozen top quality, subscription free team based shooters. Many of which, now, have progression and persistence of some sort – for free. The game would have been immeasurably better received it had simply been a boxed product, with paid-for in-game items, IMO. This may not have been possible, given what was spent on the game and the running costs, but the market is tough. You can’t simply charge what you feel like earning and hope the paying public will agree with your judgement of value. Many of us within RTW were extremely nervous at APB’s prospects long before launch, and with good reason, as it turns out.

They also failed spectacularly to manage expectations. When Dave J spoke out saying there would ‘not be a standard subscription model’, he unwittingly set expectations at ‘free to play’. When it’s announced that we’re essentially pay-per-hour, we get absolutely killed in the press, somewhat understandably. The game also announced far too early (though it kept being delayed), and had little to show but customisation for what seemed like years, largely because internally we (correctly) judged it to be the stand out part of the game. But we should have kept our powder dry. Our PR felt tired and dragged on and on, rather than building a short, sharp crescendo of excitement pre-release. We also went to beta far too early, wiser heads were ignored when it was pointed out that any kind of beta, even very early beta, might as well be public as far as generating word of mouth. The real purpose of beta is publicity, not bug fixing. We never took that lesson on board. We also made the error of not releasing fixes externally to many of the issues early beta testers were picking up, keeping the fixes on internal builds, I presume to lessen the load on QA. This simply meant that to early beta testers, it looked as though we were never bothering to fix the issues they found, when in fact, they were being fixed, simply being deployed back into beta very infrequently. This lesson was eventually learnt, but only after we’d pissed off a large number of early-adopters.

The sheer time spent and money it took to make APB is really a product of fairly directionless creative leadership. Certainly Dave J has great, strong, ambitious ideas for his games. But he’s a big believer in letting the details emerge along the way, rather than being planned out beyond even a rudimentary form. For most of the lifetime of APB, he was also CEO of the whole company, as well as Creative Director. His full attention was not there until it late in the day. This has ramifications for how long his projects run – many years, on average – and the associated cost. This, in turn, means that the business model options were constrained, conspiring to place APB in a really difficult position, commercially. Ultimately, it’s this pairing of a subscription model cost with free to play game play that really did for the game. And many of us saw it coming a mile off. I must admit I’m dismayed about the scale of the failure, however. Many of us thought APB might do OK at retail and sell a few hundred thousand, though struggle on ongoing revenue, and gradually carve a niche. But it absolutely tanked at retail I believe (though I’m not privvy to figures) I think due to the critical mauling it received. It never made the top 20 of the all format UK chart. It’s scraping along the bottom of the PC-only chart, a situation I’m assuming is replicated in its major markets. And being at the bottom of the PC-only chart is not where you want to be as a AAA budget game. God knows what the budget was, but when you account for the 150-odd staff and all the launch hardware and support, it was in the tens of millions of dollars.

MyWorld is an innocent bystander caught up in the demise of APB. Which is a real shame, because it is genuinely ground breaking, though not aimed at the traditional gamer audience. It was going great guns over the last year or so, coming on leaps and bounds, impressing everyone who saw it. MyWorld might as well have been a different company – there was very little staff overlap on the two projects, they worked under entirely different production methodologies, and because we were not the next in line for release we received very little attention from the execs (which was a good thing, to be honest). We knew that time was limited, and tried to encourage management to go the ‘google-style beta route – release a limited, but polished core feature set early, and iterate. What happens to it from here on out is not clear, but without the people who wrote it, the code isn’t worth a damn, so I can’t see the project being picked up. Management tried to get a publisher onboard to fund continued development, but the time scales involved meant that was always unlikely, despite some considerable interest from potential partners. God knows what will happen to it now the team are gone. Probably nothing. Years of my life were poured into that project, but it was a blast to make, and at least it was made public so I can point and say, “I helped make that”.

RTW tried something bold, and fucked it up. It tried to make what amounted to two MMOs at once, as well as self-publish. I have to hand it to Dave J. He’s ballsy. But in the end, we couldn’t do it, and I think the whole company will go under sooner rather than later. It’s a shame, too, as Dundee can’t absorb the level of game dev redundancies that are about to hit, which means the Dundee scene gets that little bit smaller. But that’s the price of failure, and we certainly failed. No excuses, really. We were well funded, hired some great engineers, designers and artists, and great QA guys. Ultimately, the senior management team must take responsibility. I think they had far too much focus on the company’s ‘strategic direction’ and not enough on day-to-day execution, which was where it really matters. And I think a huge part of the blame lies with Dave J, though I can’t emphasize enough how nice a man he is personally; ultimately APB has torpedoed the company, and it failed largely under his creative leadership. It has other issues (technical, for instance), but the design and the business plan are largely down to him and the board, and they are what have failed so irrevocably for the rest of us.

 

ExRTW

has great, strong, ambitious ideas for his games. But he’s a big believer in letting the details emerge along the way, rather than being planned out beyond even a rudimentary form. For most of the lifetime of APB, he was also CEO of the whole company, as well as Creative Director. His full attention was not there until it late in the day. This has ramifications for how long his projects run – many years, on average – and the associated cost. This, in turn, means that the business model options were constrained, conspiring to place APB in a really difficult position, commercially. Ultimately, it’s this pairing of a subscription model cost with free to play game play that really did for the game. And many of us saw it coming a mile off. I must admit I’m dismayed about the scale of the failure, however. Many of us thought APB might do OK at retail and sell a few hundred thousand, though struggle on ongoing revenue, and gradually carve a niche. But it absolutely tanked at retail I believe (though I’m not privvy to figures) I think due to the critical mauling it received. It never made the top 20 of the all format UK chart. It’s scraping along the bottom of the PC-only chart, a situation I’m assuming is replicated in its major markets. And being at the bottom of the PC-only chart is not where you want to be as a AAA budget game. God knows what the budget was, but when you account for the 150-odd staff and all the launch hardware and support, it was in the tens of millions of dollars.

MyWorld is an innocent bystander caught up in the demise of APB. Which is a real shame, because it is genuinely ground breaking, though not aimed at the traditional gamer audience. It was going great guns over the last year or so, coming on leaps and bounds, impressing everyone who saw it. MyWorld might as well have been a different company – there was very little staff overlap on the two projects, they worked under entirely different production methodologies, and because we were not the next in line for release we received very little attention from the execs (which was a good thing, to be honest). We knew that time was limited, and tried to encourage management to go the ‘google-style beta route – release a limited, but polished core feature set early, and iterate. What happens to it from here on out is not clear, but without the people who wrote it, the code isn’t worth a damn, so I can’t see the project being picked up. Management tried to get a publisher onboard to fund continued development, but the time scales involved meant that was always unlikely, despite some considerable interest from potential partners. God knows what will happen to it now the team are gone. Probably nothing. Years of my life were poured into that project, but it was a blast to make, and at least it was made public so I can point and say, “I helped make that”.

RTW tried something bold, and fucked it up. It tried to make what amounted to two MMOs at once, as well as self-publish. I have to hand it to Dave J. He’s ballsy. But in the end, we couldn’t do it, and I think the whole company will go under sooner rather than later. It’s a shame, too, as Dundee can’t absorb the level of game dev redundancies that are about to hit, which means the Dundee scene gets that little bit smaller. But that’s the price of failure, and we certainly failed. No excuses, really. We were well funded, hired some great engineers, designers and artists, and great QA guys. Ultimately, the senior management team must take responsibility. I think they had far too much focus on the company’s ‘strategic direction’ and not enough on day-to-day execution, which was where it really matters. And I think a huge part of the blame lies with Dave J, though I can’t emphasize enough how nice a man he is personally; ultimately APB has torpedoed the company, and it failed largely under his creative leadership. It has other issues (technical, for instance), but the design and the business plan are largely down to him and the board, and they are what have failed so irrevocably for the rest of us.

ExRTW

[RegenanceE 3]

APB was just a failure founded game, which eventually ended up 3 companies careers, this game must be cursed or something..

[Seedy 324]

On 8/3/2019 at 5:47 PM, 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.

lol how little you know. How do you know 70% of its code is corrupted?

 

[neophobia 216]

1 hour ago, CookiePuss said:

Dark just talks. Everything he suggests is just vague nonsense. He doesn't actually know anything about that which he speaks. 

never would've guessed

[Seedy 324]

On 8/3/2019 at 6:30 PM, Ohshii said:

snip

 

this is pretty much wrong. The office was in Edinburgh in Scotland (Reloaded Productions). Just off princess street. The reason I know this is because I am from Dundee in Scotland where APB was made and I knew some people who worked on APB and at the Edinburgh studio (they moved there from the Dundee's Marketgate Studios, now a Pure Gym - I live about 5 minutes drive from the RTW studios and my own offices looked directly in to RTW in 2008 to 2010). Infact I was talking to 4 of them last week (i was at a job interview for a games company in Dundee who is made up of around 20 people from RTW. The 3 people who interviewed me all worked for RTW and the guy who set the interview for me also worked at RTW (although he worked on project MyWorld which ate up allot of RTW money). We spoke about APB at the interview surprisingly. They asked laughingly if i am the only person still playing lol ands one of them said to me "why the fuck did we ever build the death theme maker. It was pointless. To which I replied "na man its shit hot" in my dundee accent  ). Although I have known a few of them since around early 2010. Also I was the wedding photographer for the Lead Artist who now owns another games company in Dundee as well. I used to speak with him allot about RTW, Dave Jones and APB in general and It was him who originally told me that G1 was taking over APB (although he though it was K2 studios at first) and it was going to go free to play with microtransactions (which he hated and scalded )  and I announced it to to the world and to a HUGE barrage of "THIS IS BULL" on the APB forums that I owned and ran back at the end of APB''s time with RTW.

Edited August 5, 2019 by Seedy

[Rat1oNRUs 70]

didn't davy jones spent the money on him self no?

[TheMessiah 430]

The game was innovative for its time but the main reason why failed(at least in my opinion)was that RTW focus more on cuztomizations and not on actual gameplay and the variety of things player can do on this maps.Small amount of people have designing/artistic talents and different global researches shows that.I guess RTW from developers point of view didnt consider it.People play gta type of games because of the gameplay.Simple:the lack of game content failed it.Probably if there was more pve elements-maybe another story.The 2nd main thing that failed this game was the horrible shooting mechanics.G1/RP put a lot of work on improving that so we can have what we have right now.The third main thing was the publisher EA which was in hurry to get rid of the game when saw the low sales.Overall this short review wraps up everything pretty well:

 

[Ohshii 215]

Yeah I meant Scotland not Ireland. Im a trash American, sorry for getting them mixed up. I never worked for RTW, just for K2/G1 and was there for the entire buyout and acquisition of APB. Regardless, everybody at RTW was grossly overpaid and fucked off a lot of money. I hope they had a good vacation at least while it lasted.

[Mitne 724]

19 hours ago, Darkzero3802 said:

APB still lives on today. It has a loyal fanbase and could have gone places but G1 didnt give 2 shits and milked it instead. Thats a big difference then too much of a burden.

What I meant is that G1 financial model of destroying games for cash didn't worked with APB and APB outlived company.

Games like Warrock didn't survived G1 milking.

Edited August 5, 2019 by Mitne

[Nymphi--DoubleDee 83]

On 8/3/2019 at 9:47 AM, 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.

Because a lot of APB is custom coded Unreal modules. How about this. Dynamic Day and Night cycles didn't exist, until APB made the module for it. There is quite a lot of custom coded and strung together modules, that even the developers don't know how they got it working. This has been one of the largest hamperings to upgrading the Engine. Because so many custom modules and coding is linking all of this together, and changing one thing has had huge impacts across the entire game. For example, Tracers.

 

The game had a massive team (300+) as well, and a lot of mismanagement, and even departments not knowing what one had was doing from the other. 

On 8/3/2019 at 10:02 AM, BIank said:

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

RTW raised over $300m. APB had $150m sunk into it.

11 hours ago, PTCNette said:

That's some bullshoot, Star Citizen has raised above 200million and see what they've done so far. There are plenty of games that released by the time APB got released to F2P and even in CBT and when was a paid game, The game just seem to be a work of beginner developers whom just scripted a game with weird vehicle handling, Autistic Physics and I assume that so far more and more games are adopting that creative customization.. So nothing is special about this game, just broken and needs much more attention.

And do you realize how far Game Engines, and coding has come since 2005?

On 8/3/2019 at 12:11 PM, Darkzero3802 said:

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

6 Employees trying to rework a discombobulated old engine code that over 100 coders made............................................................................ And even those original coders don't know how everything worked.............

 

And you think, them getting (per Matt Scott) 90+% of it done, is them not giving a shit?

Edited August 5, 2019 by Nymphi--DoubleDee

[BrandonBranderson 672]

On 8/5/2019 at 7:14 PM, Nymphi--DoubleDee said:

6 Employees trying to rework a discombobulated old engine code that over 100 coders made............................................................................ And even those original coders don't know how everything worked.............

Props to Androvald for sticking  with us this whole time.

[Nymphi--DoubleDee 83]

12 hours ago, BrandonBranderson said:

Props to Androvald for sticking  with us this whole time.

Even though I still didn't get the title for finding him.....................................................................................

[MrChan 337]

BrInG bACk RtW!!!

[DragonKnight 0]

80% basic needs (feel like kings, good food, hookers, smoke -the good one- etc.).

20% actual work.

That explains spagetti code...