All Points Bulletin - Well that lasted long

G

Gottaa

Full Member
While I hate to see games companies go under, I do like to see some of the amazing apps when due to this end up hitting the mobile marketplaces, couple of great titles in the pipeline from people that were in a failed games company, just hope the various app stores reward them well. Latest example for me being Osmos HD
 
Swither

Swither

Full Member
When I played the beta, what struck me as odd, was why would you pay to play something like this, which was nothing more than a standard team shooter?

TF2, MW2 etc free to play the only difference being the customisation of your char & gang logos etc.
 
Chick

Chick

Cartwheel RIGHT
Well said swither.

The best, and most accurate derision I heard of it was "It's ok until you try to team up, shoot or drive then it falls apart". For a team based, drivign shooter that's pretty impressive.
 
Requiel

Requiel

PVC Love God
Our Game Director used to work at RTW until recently. He was ... less than glowing about the way it was managed.

The fact that they spent $100 million on APB and MyWorld (which didn't even get as far as alpha testing) is staggering. To put that into context Blizzard reckon that WoW has cost them less than 200m all together including development and all post-launch costs. WAR cost a bit more than half of that to develop and SW:TOR is reputed to be bankrolled to the tune of 150m - which will make it the most expensive MMO ever made.
 
Artanix

Artanix

Full Member
in the long term, the rewards justify the costs, but with any MMO, i'm will to bet 1st year turnover is nothing like 2nd year and onwards, they should've planned to make a loss the 1st year just developing the game from feedback, bugs, etc.

Its one thing that annoys me with MMO's these days, everybody compares it to WoW, or whatever the biggest one is at the moment, WoW is so polished because its old and been around the block for a while, its the standard. If somebody thinks to use a new system, its just shunned and dissapears.

I'm hoping some of the bigger titles have a smart enough model that allows for the first year to be tough while they make improvements and slowly gain a steady stream of players.

Just look at EVE, it has -nothing- on WoW regarding playerbase, but they know that, they don't try to compete with WoW, it just has its happy corner of the market and continues to improve and grow (well, i use the term improve loosely :D)
 
Chick

Chick

Cartwheel RIGHT
To be fair to WOW, it was pretty awesome at first too. The only bugs i recall were the odd messed up gathering spawn, and a few quest bugs. It was generally "Working as Intended" at launch.

The difference comes I guess from an existing games company expanding their franchise with a MMO than making up a bad business model, then trying to sell it. Teh pressure from financiers must be irritating.
 
Artanix

Artanix

Full Member
aye, and they plan for that.

Seems that APB went along the lines of, we need to have this done by January, so we can get the monies in.

Ok, its delayed, we should be ok for June...

right, it needs to go out in october regardless, or we go bust

Come december, they're bust (dates aren't to scale), I just can't understand why companies can't look further than the release date. I remember Auto-assault, that had a massive 160 people online in the first week (it went bust not long after).
 
Swither

Swither

Full Member
I enjoyed AA, but the devs refused to listen to customers and I quit due to that. You could ram an enemy who was on foot and the system would 'roll' to see if u did any damage lol. Another new and fun idea that was poorly done.
 
Joplin

Joplin

Full Member
It folded because it was pants. I tried it and it was like they had deliberately included all the shit elements of an mmo, tagged on a social area where you could Barbie and Ken your characters, then they made the driving crap and the shooting light years beyond crap. What a shame.
 
G

Gottaa

Full Member
I had such hopes for AA having loved Car Wars when I was jounger and played it to death on graph paper and then on the spectrum when a version came out on that, and it was less enjoyable than the spectrum version of auto assault, though my issue was much more with lag, jerkyness, invisible walls and the horribly implemented "on-foot" area
 
Chick

Chick

Cartwheel RIGHT
People complained that between beta and the first months of launch no new content had been added to the already pretty small amount of content in the game. So patch 1.4.1 adds new hats.

Yay.
Click to expand...

\o/
 
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