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More APB Drama: Did Realtime Worlds Lie To EA?
And it continues. If yesterday's heart-wrenching blog post from a laid-off developer and his upset wife didn't paint troubled developer Realtime Worlds in a bad enough light, today's rumors may. According to an anonymous insider, RTW management may have been flat-out lying to distributing partner EA for the last six months.
NowGamer has the story from a contractor who was heavily involved with Realtime Worlds during the development of APB. According to this unnamed source, "The last 6 months was chaos," and "The amount of lies told, especially to EA, was unbelievable." APB was part of the EA Partners program; that means EA does not own Realtime Worlds and did not fully fund the project, but they helped with distribution.
The insider says these lies eventually had repercussions. EA "wait[ed] until the last minute to take back online publishing rights" and told Realtime Worlds that they could publish the game "this summer or not at all." That may seem harsh, but after being in the works for at least five years (the insider says "7+"), the project was apparently costing RTW "$2 million a month between January to May in operation costs."
The end result to getting the game released so quickly can be guessed by anyone who played it: "There was a frantic push to de-bug and just get a working game out for summer and no one was asking if the game was actually worth playing let alone paying for."
The source says that in addition to all of these problems, APB also suffered from "a confused marketing campaign" and "internal politics" that aided in the game's clumsy launch.
As always in these situations, it's worth noting that anonymous comments should be taken with a grain of salt. But partnered with the other comments we've seen about APB's development, both on and off the record, a lot of what's said here sounds feasible. Did the people running the developer spend the last six months in a state of desperation and panic that caused them to go so far as to lie to the game's publishing partner?
