Realtime Worlds on Brink of Bankruptcy

[Shawn Zipay]

Realtime Worlds, the development studio behind the original Crackdown and the recently released APB are on the verge of financial bankrupty, according to Develop Online.

New administration came in the form of the Begbies Traynor Group taking over operations at the company. This came shortly after the company's work force went from 170 staff to just 50 employees remaining. These 50 employees are still working on APB, at least for the time being.

Realtime Worlds now has a deadline to find an investor that can save the firm from liquidation.

If no willing investor is found, Realtime World’s final game will have been All Points Bulletin – an ambitious, five-year gamble that attempted to merge the sandbox action genre with an MMO monetisation structure.

That gamble, which convinced investors to supply at least $80 million to the studio, failed to pay off.

A huge issue for the studio came about after rather lackluster reviews and sales for their criminally themed MMO, APB.

[Linux]

Re: Realtime Worlds on Brink of Bankruptcy

I had a hunch that they would get screwed by their APB game, its not a fun game, it get olds really fast and just over all really dumb.

[[MiA]BUTTMAN]

Re: Realtime Worlds on Brink of Bankruptcy

lets hope all these people can find work.

[K-16]

Re: Realtime Worlds on Brink of Bankruptcy

GameTrailers contributed to the lackluster reviews, but they did mention they are hoping for updates to the game to fix the issues they ran into. It was an overall unpolished initial release, so they're not saying it will stay that "bad." It felt more like an open beta than anything. However, it is headscratching to see players who paid in their subscriptions get very minimal value out of it (apparently non-paying players aren't missing much currently). Looks like lack of time and polish to the game is financially hitting the company harder than they would've expected; something I doubt they anticipated for in their naive business plan (I'm assuming they used one to talk to investors). I'm not even sure how the company believed they can defeat Rockstar Games when it was time to release. Well, reality hit them now, and I am once again scared of this volatile industry.