The lights are on
UPDATE: It seems that Activision may be trying to help ease Realtime Worlds' woes. According to Develop Online, the megapublisher is flying six key RTW staffers out to a recruitment event in the United Kingdom. If any news comes out of this, we'll be sure to update further.ORIGINAL STORY: Realtime Worlds, the developer behind the original Crackdown, has entered administration – a process in the UK similar to bankruptcy proceedings in North America.According to the BBC, the studio currently employs about 200 people (after cutbacks last week), but things aren't looking good for the future of Realtime Worlds. The appointed administrators are attempting to find a buyer for the business. The likely culprit for the developer's woes is APB, which was poorly received by critics and consumers alike. After a five-year development cycle, the game just didn't deliver the necessary sales, which put the company in a bad place. Unless a buyer is found, future support of APB is doubtful.Also caught up in the fiasco is MyWorld, the next game scheduled to come out from the studio. A commenter at Rock, Paper Shotgun claiming to be an ex-Realtime Worlds employee said: "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." The anonymous commenter also offers some insight as to what went wrong with APB: "The sheer time spent and money it took to make APB is really a product of fairly directionless creative leadership."Even if APB wasn't a huge success, it's still sad to see another development house in trouble. We wish Realtime Worlds and its employees luck for whatever lies ahead.
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It's be cool if maybe Sony bought them, but if anyone is going to, my guess would be Microsoft, since they have a history with them.
The ideal situation here: Microsoft buys Realtime Worlds & allows them to work on Crackdown 3 to get back on their feet. Idk if Microsoft is that nice though.
HAHAHAHAHAHAH!! sucks for them!..........
no but seriously, this is really unfortunate. yet another dev that is having money troubles. hopefully someone can give them some financial relief, and get them back on their feet. They deserve a chance after making the original crackdown.
Maybe they will get a bailout?! - Oh Wait - it's in the UK.
Yeah...who ever was leading the APB design drove it straight into the ground. So much potential wasted :(
Gah, this kind of stuff is so sad... having flashbacks of Flagship and Helllgate D;
Yeah, a lot of people I know who play a lot of shooters don't pay to play (including me, most of the time anyway), so, although I knew a lot of people setting their eyes of APB, when we found out that we had to pay per hour, it just didn't seem worth it from what I saw in the beta.
APB was a game that had so many ideas, but no one to make good one them. Why they shipped the game like it was is beyond me. The only thing I can think of is that they were in trouble financially and had to ship the game no matter what, so it got shipped with unbalanced weapons and combat, repetitive missions and gameplay, and uneventful missions that should have been filled with action.
I do believe that they had honestly planned on fixing the game after launch. I by no means think they wanted to release it in this state and I am sure they had every intentionon making it awesome through patches. Wether or not they can still do it is up in the air.
Make the game f2p with item shop. That should help out a lot.
Wow one game put them under that really does suck
unfortunate but thats what happens when u develop a title for five years and it turns out bad
Maybe Activision will do for Realtime what Canada did for Silicon Knights.
not realtime worlds...i was looking forward to myworld, and loved the 1st crackdown
Buy them Microsoft!!
APB = DOA
once i heard APB ws bad i knew it was comeing any day
Hopefully someone will step up and buy this company so all this talent does not go to waste.