I was rather shocked at my colleagues cold reaction to the news of Realtime World’s descent into administration. Many of us would regard ourselves as being fairly hardcore gamers, but also well informed about goings-on in the gaming world. Indeed many of us regularly contribute to various gaming websites, or at the very least have contacts within the games development world. So I was rather mystified to find that my colleagues were hugely dismissive of the fall Realtime World, focusing on the product that was released rather then fates of possibly hundreds of staff members. Whilst it was indeed folly to waste by some estimates, up to $100,000,000, the impact of RTW’s collapse will send shockwaves throughout the industry, and as such will have consequences for ourselves, the core gamers.

APB had been in development since 2005, and yet David Jones, the head of Realtime World’s had been planning his magnum opus for the best part of 20 years – way before he made Grand Theft Auto. On the way, he had amassed one of the greatest development studios in the United Kingdom, became one of the darlings of Dundee’s tech industries, and was developing perhaps the most exciting prospect in British games development. I myself had the opportunity to see some of what David Jones’s studio was doing at the Edinburgh International Games Festival back in 2008 when I was with PWGM, where they were showing off the customisable features of their new game as well as a short gameplay segment showing off the general combat. Since then, interest had grown in the new product, and when the closed beta was announced, players clamoured to go and play it, including community members Rynex, Spyker, Devozade – I was playing GTA IV at the time – and the response was initially positive. The first indication of problems manifested themselves as average gunplay and technical difficulties, all of which was assumed to be fixed in future updates

Unfortunately as we all know, APB came out with distinctly disappointing reviews and flopped dramatically at the POS, by some estimates earning only 1% of the total development investment, resulting in the closure of RTW and putting the future of another RTW project, MyWorld in jeopardy, and dealt a significant blow to the already battered confidence of the UK games industry. As detailed in the GamesIndustry.biz article about the fall of RTW, the collapse of the studio signified a deep crisis within the UK games industry, particularly since the abrupt cancellation of the proposed UK Games Industry Subsidy by the current coalition government. It’ll be churlish to declare the UK games industry extinct due to the consequences of two failed initiatives, but it does mean that publishers and developers will be far more cautious from now on, generating safe but homogeneous games instead of original content, resulting in stagnation for industry as a whole the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Great Video Games Crash of 1983. Okay, I was exaggerating a bit, but for us hardcore gamers who embrace the whole process of developing and enjoying games, the fall of Realtime Worlds will have dire implications for us. As for myself, I hope that both developers and publishers don’t draw the wrong conclusions from RTW’s fall.

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