APB - All Points Bulletin

» see apb.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

apb was supposed to be the gta mmo. dave jones, who had created grand theft auto at dma design and lemmings before that, started realtime worlds in 2002 with a vision of an open-world cops-and-robbers persistent world that ran the rockstar formula at mmo scale. nine years and somewhere north of $100 million later, the result shipped on june 29 2010. reviewers slammed it on arrival, and the servers went off on september 16. that is a 79-day window from launch to corpse.

realtime worlds went into administration in august 2010, before the apb servers were even off. the studio's other big bet, crackdown 2, had also missed its mark. at peak the company had over 250 employees in dundee, scotland, the largest game studio in the country. by year-end most of them were gone. the apb ip got sold off in november 2010 to k2 network for £1.5 million, which by then was less than realtime worlds had been paying per week in server hosting.

apb was the kind of game you heard about from gaming press the way you hear about a plane crash. by 2010 i was already past the post-counter-strike era and on the way to a real career, and a $100 million scottish gta-mmo collapsing in two months was the kind of story you read on gamasutra rather than logged into. the second-life-mmo class of game had never really landed in turkey anyway. apb never had a turkish version, and on tr-ping its servers would have been borderline unplayable.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

realtime worlds was the post-rockstar darling of british gaming. dave jones had sold dma design (which later became rockstar north) and started over in dundee in 2002 with a long runway. crackdown for xbox 360 in 2007 was the studio's first hit. apb was the followup, pitched as everything crackdown was but as a persistent online city.

the funding cycle was steady through the decade. webzen put in $50 million in 2007, and another $50 million came from various sources by 2008. by 2010 the total development bill had crossed nine figures. the studio had over 250 staff in scotland, the largest game studio in the country.

~ the cracks ~

the game's reception was the visible problem, but the underlying issue was that the design never converged. apb was an mmo built around a customization system. the actual gameplay was a third-person shooter with mediocre gunplay and a progression system that never quite progressed. you could spend forty minutes building a character outfit and composing a custom vehicle horn, then climb into a sandbox where the missions were the same handful of formats repeated forever. metacritic settled at 58. the gaming press, which had been quietly skeptical for two years, became loud immediately.

realtime worlds called administrators in on august 17 2010, seven weeks after launch. the apb servers stayed up for another month while the administrators looked for a buyer. by september 16 they had pulled the plug.

~ what got buried with it ~

apb's ip went to k2 network's gamersfirst label, which relaunched it as apb reloaded free-to-play in 2011. little orbit took it over in 2018 and the pc version is still running in 2026, in the same zombie-alive state as a hundred other small mmos. the original studio's collapse was harder to recover from. dundee lost its anchor game-development employer in the collapse, and the apb story became the cautionary tale you hand to anyone pitching a $100-million single-player-mmo crossover with no clear core loop.

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