APB: How To Blow $100,000,000.00

"Just walk away, venture capitalists. All you have to do is just walk away."

If you ever wanted the answer to the question “how to spend $100m on an MMO” (are you listening, Bioware?), the UK is the place to be this week, or at least to review the damage. Three sources from Britain analyze what is, if not a neutron bomb, at least a very explody one, with game industry recruiters already combing the wreckage for cheap ‘acquisitions’ of talent.

First, apparently from within the bunker, an anonymous commenter left a very detailed, very caustic comment on the British gaming blog site “Rock Paper Shotgun”

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.

Nicholas Lovell, at GamesBrief, comes right out and calls APB “a massive fail“. Well, when it kills your company, yeah.

Back in the summer of 2009, Dave said that with 100,000 to 200,000 players the game would do alright financially. I estimated that each player would have to spend £500 on the game for the investors to make their money back with those figures, which seemed unlikely to me. (That was when I thought the company had raised $50 million. It would be $1,000 based on $100m of investment.)

But 100,000 players, which I imagine seemed a laughably low target to the management of RealTime Worlds, is 10x the number of players who have even bought the game.

APB is turning out to be the games industry’s own Heaven’s Gate.

Lovell analyzes APB’s sales numbers and comes to the jarring conclusion that APB sold less than 10,000 units, which would, given its budget, easily make it the most ridiculously disastrous MMO launch of all time. Adam Martin, in his post on the subject, believes the number to be closer to 100,000 based on his sources, which brings it from “ridiculous disaster” to “unsustainable disappointment”. He goes on to contrast the discussion from within and about Realtime Worlds with his own experience with Tabula Rasa:

The professionals: you’re getting burned out, chewed up, and spat out. Your lives are being wasted.

The investors: you’re getting screwed. You write it off as random failure, and you can afford it, but you’re shying away from “games” as a result, leaving good profits behind on the table.

The inexperienced, the mediocre, and all those people who don’t actually MAKE the game, but do get to ruin the process (rockstar-designers, producers, marketers, directors, managers, etc) : you’re doing great. Your lack of skill hasn’t held you back, and the company will often go bankrupt before anyone gets around to firing you for incompetence.

Why yes, the game industry DOES make you that bitter and jaded. Especially when you watch $100,000,000.00 go circling down the drain.

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  • http://Website J.

    Definitely should’ve aimed at a free to play model.

  • http://Website Mist

    The game definitely sold more than 10,000 units. There were simultaneous 2000 players a night online on each of the two US servers for the first month. The two Euro servers had similar numbers.

    The game was a plenty fun game, just not anything that could be considered an MMO.

  • http://stylishcorpse.wordpress.com Ysharros

    Totally off-topic but any post with a pic of & reference to The Humongous is win. Total win.

  • http://Website Guy

    Everything’s getting called an MMO…

  • http://luminance.org/ Kevin Gadd

    Ultimately this makes me wonder whether the investors do any sort of due diligence at all for projects like this. It was blatantly obvious that the project was not ready to ship when it did, and even more so, the business model was unproven and failed to make basic logical sense. I don’t understand how something like APB gets green-lit, especially to the tune of a hundred million dollars. Is the project just old enough that they were able to get a blank check from a gullible investor back when GTA games were the cool new thing?

  • http://Website Thomas

    I never wanted to play APB but it did look like the long awaited GTA like MMO some people were hoping for. I guess I was wrong.

  • http://Website Mist


    Kevin Gadd:

    Ultimately this makes me wonder whether the investors do any sort of due diligence at all for projects like this. It was blatantly obvious that the project was not ready to ship when it did, and even more so, the business model was unproven and failed to make basic logical sense. I don’t understand how something like APB gets green-lit, especially to the tune of a hundred million dollars. Is the project just old enough that they were able to get a blank check from a gullible investor back when GTA games were the cool new thing?

    Did you even play the game? It was plenty ready to ship. It was fun, you could shoot people and blow up cars. It was relatively competitive. It ran relatively good on machines with similar specs to other shooters. It was merely lacking some content, and functioning cheat protection.

  • http://Website Mist

    That said, I have no idea where 100 mil went. It certainly wasn’t spent on content generation. Then again, I have no idea how Mythic spent 80+ on Warhammer and shipped it in the state it did. APB was in a better launch state than WAR.

  • http://luminance.org/ Kevin Gadd


    Mist:


    Kevin Gadd:

    Ultimately this makes me wonder whether the investors do any sort of due diligence at all for projects like this. It was blatantly obvious that the project was not ready to ship when it did, and even more so, the business model was unproven and failed to make basic logical sense. I don’t understand how something like APB gets green-lit, especially to the tune of a hundred million dollars. Is the project just old enough that they were able to get a blank check from a gullible investor back when GTA games were the cool new thing?

    Did you even play the game? It was plenty ready to ship. It was fun, you could shoot people and blow up cars. It was relatively competitive. It ran relatively good on machines with similar specs to other shooters. It was merely lacking some content, and functioning cheat protection.

    Let’s ignore the bad controls, the obvious lack issues, the lack of content, the lack of cheat protection, the lack of a clear progression path, the lack of anything resembling balance in the weapons and upgrades, terrible load times, and the abysmal performance on even top of the line machines.

    How can a game be ready to ship when your business model *doesn’t work*, and more imporantly, when your game is *not fun*?

    The shooting and driving controls were both bad and the unbalanced weapons meant a newbie player got to spend most of their time outmatched, dying repeatedly or driving a car around trying to chase down an opponent in an escape mission. Alternately, you could do boring missions solo without any opposition for miniscule, worthless rewards. Entire mechanics like notoriety (vastly easier for criminals than enforcers) and stuns were clearly not ready either.

    The game was not ready to ship because it did not contain nearly enough content to justify the box price, and even worse, there was nothing there to give customers a reason to give them money to keep playing.

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  • http://geldonsgaming.blogspot.com/ geldonyetich

    Just die already, mainstream gaming. Nobody likes you and your, “my game costs several million dollars and I recognize that not enough people are gamers to recoup this price therefore I will develop my game to cater to people who are not gamers and therefore have no idea what game quality is and therefore I am off the hook to create a truly game with my millions of dollars” ways.

  • http://snafzg.mmofansites.com Snafzg


    Mist:

    That said, I have no idea where 100 mil went. It certainly wasn’t spent on content generation. Then again, I have no idea how Mythic spent 80+ on Warhammer and shipped it in the state it did. APB was in a better launch state than WAR.

    Uhhh, did you see all that prerelease hype generation they did? The likes of which has never been nor ever will be attained again? :P

    That and they also basically redesigned their game 9 months before it launched due to all the negative beta feedback.

  • http://Website isildur

    I posted this elsewhere, but: there are two lessons to learn from this.

    First, your game is probably niche. Budget it accordingly, so that your break-even is at 100k players or less. Preferably much less. Niche games can work just fine, when they’re developed on the cheap with reasonable expectations.

    Second, subscription is dead.

  • http://Website isildur

    (also, reading the post from the RTW guy) This sounds suspiciously like the same mistakes we made developing Pirates. The big difference: we didn’t spend $100m on Pirates, so its break-even is a hell of a lot lower. We could afford to make those mistakes and learn from them.

  • http://Website MCM

    @isildur

    You know, some day I’d love to hear the inside story (assuming there is one) of what happened with PotBS.

  • http://Website Freakazoid


    MCM:

    @isildur
    You know, some day I’d love to hear the inside story (assuming there is one) of what happened with PotBS.

    This, definitely. PotBS was a decent game in mid beta, but somehow got worse as things went along (most notably the massive gutting of the exp curve before live).

  • http://Website Mery

    “That and they also basically redesigned their game 9 months before it launched due to all the negative beta feedback.”

    You mean for Mythic’s Warhammer? As I recall didn’t they use active subscribers of DAOC to Beta War? Anyone remaining after all that time was clinically insane and not to be trusted.

  • http://Website isildur

    There isn’t really any ‘dirt’ on Pirates. (And, of course, I still work here and still support the game, though much more indirectly these days.)

    The only real story is the same story for the whole industry: subscription is dead. Users don’t like the model, and subscription games have to prove themselves against WoW’s price point and total content. I still think Pirates is a pretty good game, and I’m happy with a lot of what’s in it, but I don’t really blame people who have told me “I didn’t think it was worth a sub.”

    I’ve canceled subs for good games before, simply because I couldn’t justify the value I was getting for my monthly fee. (Though, having a 3-year-old means I need to get a *lot* of value, these days…)

  • http://Website isildur

    Although, if what you’re asking is ‘Why wasn’t Pirates as good as [some other game] at launch?’, the answer is almost certainly one of two things:

    1) It’s something I did, for good or ill
    2) We made that game on a budget that you’d find shocking if I were allowed to tell you the numbers.

  • http://Website Mandella

    You know, this is the first I’ve heard of this game, and I don’t think I’m *that* insulated. Hell, I even know what Roma Victor is! And I’ve played Auto Assault and have bitched about the lack of a good driving game as MMO (or even a good MMO with driving as a part of it).

    100 million eh? What a waste.

  • http://Website Vetarnias

    At least, I did hear about APB, which is more than I could have said for Earth Eternal (which we now know has been sold). But I never looked into it, and I thought, based on the relatively small amount of news it was getting, that it was a modestly-budgeted MMO from an independent studio, probably running on RMT.

    But 100 million dollars, with this concept, in a niche genre, not based on a well-known franchise, and with competition? I’m surprised someone did not think it through.

    @isildur

    “Subscription is dead.”

    I hope not, though you’re probably right, since WoW cornered that market a while ago to the extent that most subscription MMO’s, I’ve seen it claimed, are now in competition against one another for players’ second subscription, in addition to WoW. Which makes $15/month for a second-string title rather prohibitive. I remember reading people who suggested that PotBS, for instance, should have lowered its monthly cost expressly for that reason.

    Secondly, subscription was given a bad reputation by the number of over-hyped games that introduced themselves as the next WoW slayer, and which you could not even try without paying. It’s getting even worse now that developers are brazen enough to introduce “pre-order and get exclusive beta access” schemes. Can’t even try the game without buying: more points for Free to Play, even though I loathe their particular tendency to remain in “open beta” for months, despite asking for money already.

    Thirdly, because of that equally disturbing trend of adding RMT on top of a subscription. Now that Blizzard has all but bestowed its imprimatur on this particular con, we can expect more of the same, even though it turns the necessity of subscription into a repugnant ripoff.

    Fourthly, a subscription game will always retain an aura of exclusivity, but it’s perhaps this point which attract me to the subscription model: not because I’m an MMO elitist, but because subscription guarantees the sanctity of the game world, where you don’t get ahead by paying more money, but just by what you do in the game (please, don’t rain on my parade by reminding me of gold-buying services; they’re illegal anyway).

    My playing pattern, by the way, is usually like this: If a subscription game interests me, I don’t hesitate to subscribe, but I’m an incorrigible freeloader in F2P games, no matter how interesting they might be, and intensely dislike people who blow money on them. I have been stepping back from “Lord of Ultima”, for instance, not only because it’s impossible to stay competitive without spending money, but because I saw someone claim in chat to have spent $500 on the game, and I have no problem believing him. And right now, he’s the largest player on the server.

    “Although, if what you’re asking is ‘Why wasn’t Pirates as good as [some other game] at launch?’, the answer is almost certainly one of two things:

    1) It’s something I did, for good or ill
    2) We made that game on a budget that you’d find shocking if I were allowed to tell you the numbers.”

    The budget, no matter how small, wasn’t really a problem for me, especially since it usually means spending it on graphics. PotBS’s were fine.

    I’m not sure about #1, though. I certainly didn’t have “Blame Isildur” in mind when I dusted off that old “the people who want to gank are waiting for the next big failure to come along” quote; I was curious as to what happened in the creative process that made it go from this view to “no crying in the red circle”, then, five months after release, back to “we’re going to make ganking go away”.

    Maybe that’s why the behind-the-scenes story of the development of PotBS would make a quite compelling read: There seems to be such a dichotomy between your views and what the game offered that something had to happen in the creative process.

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  • http://Website mythago


    isildur:

    Although, if what you’re asking is ‘Why wasn’t Pirates as good as [some other game] at launch?’, the answer is almost certainly one of two things:
    1) It’s something I did, for good or ill
    2) We made that game on a budget that you’d find shocking if I were allowed to tell you the numbers.

    Well, if it makes you feel any better, my spouse had to be pried off PotBS at divorcepoint. :D

  • Josh

    Would be a more useful article if “APB” were defined somewhere.

  • http://Website Eirik

    Why the .00 in the title? Adding redundant decimals to make numbers look “bigger” is shitty tabloid behavior.

  • http://Website Anthony

    APB is the name of the game, doofus.

  • http://Website Matt


    Josh:

    Would be a more useful article if “APB” were defined somewhere.

    What do you mean by “defined”? APB is an acronym for “All Points Bulletin”, but the name of the game this article is talking about is actually just APB. I’m not sure what you want defined…

  • http://Website :)

    @josh APB stands for all points bulletin , the police code which the game is partly based off of if you need more info on the game RealTime worlds has a whole youtube page as well as in game forums on their website called http://na.apb.com/en/age-verification for north american users

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  • http://whats-hot-weekly.com Randy

    In all fairness, any game that is played online by a lot of players can be considered an MMO because MMO simply means “Massive Multiplayer Online”. One thousand players is a massive amount. If the game has a huge world map, it may also be considered massive. Multiplayer = more than one player. I’m not arguing for it being called an MMO. I’m only saying that technically it COULD be called an MMO based on what it is.

  • http://Website Narj


    Kevin Gadd:

    Ultimately this makes me wonder whether the investors do any sort of due diligence at all for projects like this.

    Due Dilligence is done *before* an investment is made. You can do all the due dilligence in the world, but if things don’t work the way they were supposed to, it doesn’t really matter.

  • http://Website JoeCatman

    I just read in EDGE magazine today about how Trion is developing three MMO’s, and how they “netted 100 million to fund 3 immediate projects”. The article goes into detail about how the CEO, Lars Buttler meets with venture capitalists and shows a powerpoint showing the profitability of MMO’s like WoW. One of their 3 projects is this RTS MMO called “End of Nations” which makes me think of Rise of Nations. It bothers me how generic their title is. It makes me think that the gameplay will be similarly generic. I predict disaster.

  • http://Website penkilk

    does this mean that if i buy it, somewhere in the tune of $10,000 dollars was spent on my entertainment? suddenly it sounds exotic…

  • kmonk

    where did it all go wrong? expectations expectations. thinking with their wallets and not about player experience. Thinking about the hype that a super computer powered game would bring and disregarding the reality of things.
    Make a good game, give it a good base, give it great content, give the player control. Release it, give back to the community.

    Make your profit, donate half to enviroment groups, make more money from gamer do gooders, upgrade game. etc.

    NEW GAME! now with a trillion pixel gigaflop symmetric fluid dynamic ragdoll amputee system in 3D!

    ON BLUE RAY!!!

    nobody cares about that, godamn treating us all like fools.
    I’m off to play a decent game… quake ONE.

  • http://Website kmonk

    oh and another thing.

    IT COST 100,000,000 DOLLARS TO MAKE SO IT MUST BE GOOD!

    i wonder how many starving pakistani’s that 100,000,000 could have fed, now THAT would have been good.

    maybe then i would have brought your stupid freaking game.

  • http://fdsd 133

    MMO is gay anyway waste of time and money… and about money 50 mil prolly have been stolen by devs! I wish i was going to get that much funding!

  • http://blog.weflyspitfires.com We Fly Spitfires

    It seems odd to me how so many professional games companies can have such flawed business models. It doesn’t take a genius to spend a few hours analysing the gaming market and come up with sensible conclusions about how much revenue could be generated from a particular concept.

  • http://luminance.org/ Kevin Gadd


    Narj:


    Kevin Gadd:

    Ultimately this makes me wonder whether the investors do any sort of due diligence at all for projects like this.

    Due Dilligence is done *before* an investment is made. You can do all the due dilligence in the world, but if things don’t work the way they were supposed to, it doesn’t really matter.

    If the stories from ex-APB team members are true, a single person acting as both CEO and Creative Director simultaneously for a $100m project is a pretty stinking huge red flag. It’s not like APB’s failure was unexpected. Hindsight is 20/20, but I’m sure some of the danger signs were noticed and dismissed by people who either wanted a ride on the money train or were just being hopelessly optimistic.

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  • http://Website wufiavelli

    Less then 10k copies? that would mean APD sold barely more then Mortal Online.

  • http://geldonsgaming.blogspot.com/ geldonyetich


    We Fly Spitfires:
     It seems odd to me how so many professional games companies can have such flawed business models.

    It makes a lot more sense if you’ve read a lot of Dilbert comics lately.

  • http://Website Iconic


    Mist:


    Kevin Gadd:

    Ultimately this makes me wonder whether the investors do any sort of due diligence at all for projects like this. It was blatantly obvious that the project was not ready to ship when it did, and even more so, the business model was unproven and failed to make basic logical sense. I don’t understand how something like APB gets green-lit, especially to the tune of a hundred million dollars. Is the project just old enough that they were able to get a blank check from a gullible investor back when GTA games were the cool new thing?

    Did you even play the game? It was plenty ready to ship. It was fun, you could shoot people and blow up cars. It was relatively competitive. It ran relatively good on machines with similar specs to other shooters. It was merely lacking some content, and functioning cheat protection.

    I played it, at least I played the demo of it (or “open beta” or whatever they called it) and while it is a stunningly gorgeous game with a ridiculous amount of customization, it is actually a horrible game. The controls are wonky, the driving aspect is the worst experience I’ve had since playing an Atari 2600, and it was never really clear what the goal of the game was or why I’d actually want to pay by the hour.

    I’m not surprised that it’s failed horribly, I’m just surprised that they managed to spend 100 million dollars on what amounts to an extremely elaborate proof-of-concept demo.

  • http://forums.somethingawful.com Jabs The Goon

    @Isildur – you can’t tell us what the budget for PotBS was, but I recall an anecdote from Beta that gives me a pretty good idea. My memory is aging, and probably somewhat flawed, but as I recall…
    {dodolooloo doodooloolooloo}
    There was a Letter from the Russell toward the end of beta that talked about how he was looking at the books, and there wasn’t any more money left – that the company might last until the following Tuesday before having to close the project down, when an investor showed up with “one million dollars” – and that meant that the game would be completed, it would ship (more or less) on time, and that there would be money in the bank to run the company for 3-5 months – *without banking on the revenue of a single copy being sold*.

    So, my ballpark guess is that PotBS was bankrolled for significantly less than 5 million dollars.

    P.S. The Dev Team on PotBS had the best (and by ‘best’, In mean ‘most frequent’, ‘most informative’, ‘most open’, and ‘most honest’) communication with Beta Testers I’ve ever seen – more companies could learn HUGE lessons from you guys – and you specifically.

    (The Cornered Rats take the Silver Medal)

  • http://forums.somethingawful.com Jabs The Goon

    P.S. I don’t think APB ate 100 million dollars (Pounds Sterling? Euros?) in development. I’m pretty sure I recently heard that the cost was closer to 1/3 of that, and the source of the 100m pricetag was speculation that comes from a list of the “Ten Most Expensive MMOs Ever” – and they lumped *ALL* of RTW’s investment income under the APB banner (which would leave none left over for Project MyWorld, etc.), and that was an article from almost a year ago.

  • http://Website gyrus

    @isildur

    “Subscription is dead.”

    No. It’s not.
    It would be more correct to say
    Subscription -ONLY- is dead.

    Hybrid models have shown a better way – provided you don’t get greedy.

  • http://Website @mist

    @mist…. You’re an idiot. The game was/is awful. That can verified by the fact that the game has a retention rate of about 4%. So out of every 100 people who bought the game, only 4 where willing to continue playing.

  • http://cnn.com ubvman

    @isildur

    “Subscription is dead.”

    No, really no – you can’t say that if WoW is still alive making out like gangbusters, along with the other lesser games like EQ1,EQ2 and your own PotBS (I hope) that are making healthy tidy profits – however big or small relatively.

    APB’s “Pay by the Hour + RMT”

    On the other hand, is the unholy abomination undead that should have never seen the light of day.

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  • http://stabbedup.blogspot.com/ Stabs

    It’s fashionable in MMO analysis to pretend WoW and Eve don’t exist when making sweeping generalisations.

  • http://Website isildur

    First, before I clarify my subscription comment:

    “There was a Letter from the Russell toward the end of beta…[snip]”

    I dunno what you’re thinking of, but this is simply not true. As in, there is no such letter, and there was no such investor showing up with more money at the last minute.

    I say ‘subscription is dead’ because of WoW, actually, not in spite of it. I think the market has room for one large subscription game, and that trying to peel players off of WoW with a similar value proposition is a chump’s game.

    When EQ2 launched, the market wasn’t filled with free games at similar levels of quality. Now, that’s no longer true. Now, you have to compete on quality and quantity of content against WoW, and on price against DDO.

    For my part, I’m happy to see subscription die. It’s a selfish reason: I make games because I want people to play them, and subscriptions keep people from playing my games. Sure, I’m glad there’s a business model for no-sub games, but mostly I’m glad that future games I make will have a larger audience.

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