Realtime Worlds

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

~ the obituary ~

i was 26 in 2010 and not playing console-exclusive open-world games on xbox 360. crackdown was that, and apb was the windows mmo follow-up. realtime worlds is a studio i was reading about on forums and not playing the games of. dundee, scotland produced about as many landmark game studios as you would expect for a city of 150,000, which is to say a lot more than is normal.

david jones founded realtime worlds on february 7 2000 in dundee. he had cofounded dma design in '88 and shipped lemmings in 1991, then grand theft auto in 1997. by the late 90s rockstar absorbed dma and jones moved on, taking a small team to build something new under a new banner.

crackdown shipped in february 2007 as an xbox 360 exclusive and sold past 1.5 million copies. the studio grew on the back of that hit and started apb, an open-world mmo set in a city of cops and gangs. apb absorbed five years of development and over a hundred million dollars in funding. it launched on june 29 2010 with a metacritic score of 58. realtime worlds entered administration on august 17 2010, seven weeks after the launch. apb's servers stayed live through september 16, eleven weeks total, before electronic arts gave up and turned them off.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

anyway, in the years between dma design and realtime worlds, jones had spent time as a producer on tony hawk pro skater 3 and other rockstar titles. the personal credibility he carried was deep, which is what let realtime worlds raise tens of millions from venture capital in the mid 2000s. that was rare for a uk game studio that had not yet shipped a product.

crackdown landed well. the game review consensus was that it had the best open-world traversal of any xbox 360 title to date, with vertical movement that grand theft auto would not match for another four years. it was bundled with the halo 3 beta access code, which is the part that moved the units. either way, realtime worlds got the credit and used it to start scaling. by 2008 the studio had grown past 200 people and committed itself to apb.

~ the slide ~

apb the project ran nearly five years, which for a 2005-era mmo was not unusual. the issue was scope. apb was designed as a persistent online world with character customization and weapon modding running on top of a full vehicle physics layer. the team kept adding subsystems. by 2009 the budget had crossed a hundred million dollars and the publisher (electronic arts) was already telling realtime worlds that the launch had to happen no matter what.

when the game shipped in june '10 the reviews killed it on day one. matchmaking was broken at scale. character customization was praised. the actual gameplay loop felt thin, with combat that did not hold up to what cod had been training the audience for since 2007. payment was structured around a paid hours-of-play credit system that nobody understood and few wanted to top up. by mid-july the player count was already collapsing.

~ the day it died ~

anyway, the studio entered administration on august 17 2010. begbies traynor took over the books. layoffs began the same week. the apb servers stayed live another month under emergency funding until ea cut them on september 16. that is the eleven-week figure that ended up in every postmortem.

apb itself was bought out of administration by gamersfirst (k2 network) and relaunched in june 2011 as apb reloaded, a free-to-play title. that version is still operating in '26, although under so many ownership changes (reloaded productions, then little orbit) that it functions as a different game. the realtime worlds name was dissolved in 2011. david jones moved on and cofounded reagent games in '15. dundee kept its place in the european game-industry map, with abertay university still producing graduates that ended up at rockstar north and other studios.

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