Shortest MMO ever? APB closes its doors after a few short months

Brian Ambrozy 16 Sep, 2010 at 2:38pm ET Article published in Gaming

Today on the APB Community blog, they announced the closure of the short-lived MMO. Community Manager Ben ‘APBMonkey’ Bateman said,

APB has been a fantastic journey, but unfortunately that journey has come to a premature end. Today we are sad to announce that despite everyone’s best efforts to keep the service running; APB is coming to a close. It’s been a pleasure working on APB and with all its players. Together we were building an absolutely amazing game, and for that, we thank you. You guys are awesome!

From all of the Realtime World staff we thank you for your continued support.

The servers are still up, so join the party and say goodbye!

The extremely short run of the game may indicate a few things. Did a glut of MMOs and a market too small to support them all do APB in? Was it competition from other MMOs (Some free-to-play)? Or perhaps the game just wasn’t that great or was too different for people? As with any tragic death, all that’s left behind is unanswerable questions.

Comments

16 Sep 2010 ~ 3:07pm UPSLynx Holy crap, already? That's only been out for a few months.... and I thought people were actually excited about this one.
16 Sep 2010 ~ 3:16pm Cliff_Forster Mainstream gamers just want to play Halo and Call of Duty 37 different ways. Its hard to break a new concept. A crime MMO? Now, if it had Rockstar behind it and a GTA theme, everyone would have been on it. Its just the way games are marketed. Building a new franchise on a project this big and ambitious is financial suicide. Its a shame, there were some aspects that looked really compelling, though, I'm not a MMO player (just don't have the time for it)
16 Sep 2010 ~ 3:24pm TiberiusLazarus Damn, I had actually been wanting to check this out. Was waiting for them to start a 7 day free trial or something like that. Could not justify paying full retail just to try out a new mmo.
16 Sep 2010 ~ 4:11pm PhIxX Sucks for that human avatar "winner"

http://www.thehumanavatar.com/home
16 Sep 2010 ~ 4:26pm GooD I almost gave it a try few months ago...

But i didnt... I guess its one of the reasons of the faillure... Many people was "thinking about trying it" and few did it in the end.
16 Sep 2010 ~ 7:23pm NullenVoyd Oh wow, I was also waiting for a trial period on this one, but might have bought it if I had teh real jobs. It looked promising and unique, esp the in-game music system and creation features, but damn, so much for that.

I know there is likely an endless stream of reasons why it can't happen, but i still wish these dying MMOs could release something before they die to allow you to play offline.
16 Sep 2010 ~ 8:26pm Koreish I played it. Maybe it was because of my lack of experience with MMOs or maybe my near constant rage of World of Warcraft bleeding out into APB but I found it difficult and unintuitive. Nothing was explained and even for the short time I played I ran into a scary number of glitches and other problems.

It had enough potential to at least get me to try an MMO but it didn't deliver what it promised. I guess it never will now. If anyone wants to play on my account while the servers are still up they are more than welcome to.
16 Sep 2010 ~ 10:05pm NiGHTS

Koreish wrote:

I played it. Maybe it was because of my lack of experience with MMOs or maybe my near constant rage of World of Warcraft bleeding out into APB but I found it difficult and unintuitive. Nothing was explained and even for the short time I played I ran into a scary number of glitches and other problems.

It had enough potential to at least get me to try an MMO but it didn't deliver what it promised. I guess it never will now. If anyone wants to play on my account while the servers are still up they are more than welcome to.

From all that I've read the failure of the game had more to do with what was said here than anything else. The mechanics, the goals, the game itself just wasn't what it was billed to be on paper. Those in the closed beta were logging minimal hours into the game, even when the servers were running 24/7 for the final months (prior to that, servers would only let you play for 12 hours before a 'reset').

Essentially, it talked the talk...but that was it. Gamers were disappointed in the lack of what it actually delivered. Ideally, they were hoping for a mix of Saint's Row and GTA.
17 Sep 2010 ~ 1:43am akasha13 It's pretty much clear, Realtime Worlds didn't find any progress on this game. It might have been good for while, still MMOs won't really take a big hit to gamers all over the world.
18 Sep 2010 ~ 1:19am Rod They hyped it and delivered garbage, rented some servers for a few months, got your 50 buck and ran for the border. Good plan.
18 Sep 2010 ~ 9:33am Koreish I'm thinking they probably lost money on the deal. Also they're not making money from selling the game so much as milking you for continued play.
18 Sep 2010 ~ 1:31pm Cliff_Forster See, thats a huge failure in and of itself. Why MMO's charge for the worthless content disk up front is beyond me. Give that first taste out for free. Yo, motha fucka,, APB, try you some, thats all I can give you today, come back, see me in two weeks....

Thats how you build a subscriber base.
18 Sep 2010 ~ 5:10pm NiGHTS I've always viewed it as recouping development costs to that point. Per month pays for maintenance and continued development beyond that point (in addition to any profit they may be making above and beyond).
27 Sep 2010 ~ 3:39pm qwertr Yea it sucked those who missed it missed nothing spectacular. It was like playing The Sims but you got to shoot each other with super crap weapons and drive "vehicles" with top speeds of 60mph. If that got boring you could make the fanbois cry by messing up there missions and ramming them off the rode or making them miss there shots, then they would cry over voice, threaten to get you banned, threaten to frap you, and other funny stuff. Good times.
16 Nov 2010 ~ 4:54pm kryyst APB has been acquired by a new company with plans to open it back up again in 2011 as a free-to-play game using micro payments. Similar to what has happened with DDO, LoTR and apparently Champions online is heading that way too.
16 Nov 2010 ~ 6:57pm Thrax Free to play MMO (phrase, n.) See: Bad game.
17 Nov 2010 ~ 9:30am kryyst Bad game is purely subjective for a lot of reason. But on principle I disagree. DDO, LoTR and Guild Wars (though a slightly different beast) are all Free to Play MMO's and all rather good. But they are more of a niche market of games when compared to the WoW juggernaut. Conan on the other hand went free to play and does suck for the most part.

If I was being subjective I'd put the bad game hammer on WoW long before DDO. WoW is just a massed mess of 100's of 100's of hours of point click kill and resource grinding. It's addictive and all that crap but in terms of game play it's no more game then pokeman. It just costs you $15 a month to play it - plus however many hours of life your soul is worth.
17 Nov 2010 ~ 10:45am CB Totally disagree here, Thrax. While many of the "free" MMOs are crap (for example: almost anything Korean), this new micro-payments modle seems to be working well for some games, and some of them are great games (like DDO, as kryyst mentioned). As this trend catches on, I think we'll see more MMOs on this payment model. I mean: WoW is the only long-term success story for the pay-to-play model

"Free to play MMO" may have once been synonymous with "bad game", but those days are over.
17 Nov 2010 ~ 10:46am Thrax

I mean: WoW is the only long-term success story for the pay-to-play model

And EverQuest, and Eve Online, and Planetside, and...
17 Nov 2010 ~ 10:48am CB

Thrax wrote:

And EverQuest, and Eve Online, and Planetside, and...

Who? Are those Hockey teams or something? We're talking about video games here.
17 Nov 2010 ~ 10:02pm ardichoke Oh Eve Online... I'll never leave you for that over-hyped crapfest that is WoW.
18 Nov 2010 ~ 3:50pm RootWyrm Calling WoW the only "success story" is pretty much dead wrong.
EverCrack still has a significant (and dangerously vocal) subscriber base of over 20,000. Not EQ2; EVERQUEST. Ultima Online still has a fairly significant player base, and thrived for ages. Neither of these games even does the nickel and diming; just a straight up subscription fee. City of Heroes, which is the star example of how not to properly manage development and maintenance of MMOs, continues on with a subscription fee and not even the slightest consideration of going F2P. EQ and UO both predate WoW significantly, and CoX is only a few months younger as I recall.
Oh, and let's not forget Lineage. Peaked at over 3 million subscribers in Korea at one point. 10 years on (it was released in '98, LONG before WoW) it still had over 1 million paying subscribers.

So no, WoW is not the only "success" story. WoW succeeded due to a huge built-in fanbase and an army of fanbois who would have bought it.
18 Nov 2010 ~ 4:33pm CB Yes, calling WoW the only success story was hyperbole, but that wasn't even my point.

The point is that it's not the only way to do bussiness anymore, and for any MMO which isn't one of these elite (compare the number of successes in your post to the number of video games published over that time, and you'll find that "commercially successful subscription based MMO" is a very small percentage of games, compared to, let's say, commercially successful FPSs.

There isn't much room at the top of that market, and if you're not at the top, you're dead. It only makes sense that smaller or more independent thinking developers and publishers will seek another model. That does not mean that their games are crap.