It appears to be official that APB is closing, a mere 2 months and change after it was released. This might be some sort of record in the MMO world, especially given the much-heralded pedigree and investment capital behind APB. I don’t know anything about the internal workings over at Realtime Worlds, but ex-employee Luke Halliwell has posted a set of thoughts on his blog. They’re quite frank, which may be a bit of an English thing as compared to the average game developer perspective it’s pretty unedited. I have no opinion on the veracity of his notes, but I did find them a fascinating read.

I found his Part 2 to be the most interesting, as it directly discusses what happened when the company received $100m in funding: they figured out how to spend as much of it as possible as quickly as possible by hiring 300 people. Then, when they ran out of money they started nickel and diming expenses instead of releasing some headcount. It turns out that many companies have tried this strategy, and it rarely works out. It’s hard enough to scale up to be a “real company”, but no game company I am aware of has done it successfully over a 3 year time frame. You cannot grow a company built around creative work and software development that quickly. I recommend you read the linked entry, as this kind of rapid growth leads to the specific type of gaps between “business” and “development” that leads to something like the APB monetization model.

In contrast with the Realtime Worlds strategy, you can take a look at the strategy Runic Games is taking. Last week’s (9/9/2010) Active Time Babble podcast features a great interview with Max Schaefer from Runic Games, starting at the 42 minute point. The first half is discussion of the design of Torchlight 2, but starting at around 65 minutes Kat Bailey starts asking him about the business decisions behind making Torchlight 2, and Max answers them candidly in a way that few PR departments would allow. It’s not a problem, because he answers it in a way that makes me feel great about the quality of Torchlight 2 and the future of Runic. It’s particularly interesting given Max’s history at Flagship Studios, which is a company that shares some commonalities with Realtime Worlds.

Basically, the original plan for Runic was to make Torchlight 1 and then move directly into the Torchlight MMO which would be the real money maker. But then Torchlight 1 was extremely successful and fueled strong demand for a peer-to-peer multiplayer version. Because Torchlight 1 only took a year to make and the studio is only 32 or so people, they were able to refocus the company and work on Torchlight 2, which is a product that is directly based on user demand while also serving as a bridge to expertise needed to build a successful MMO. By being small and responsive to the community, they can make a product that satisfies both the market and their own creative impulses. Instead of there being a rift between business and development, they’re unified in a way that works out better for both game quality and the long term health of the company.

On APB specifically, Max says the following: “Projects have gotten too expensive and too risky and have to return so much or else they’re giant money losers, so people seem to go All In too often with their bets on getting into the online world. There’s always a temptation to go big and make the biggest and best thing ever made… it’s just so risky and the numbers are so big now, and the timelines are so long, it’s very, very easy for a project like that to fail spectacularly”. In contrast to leaping into it, Runic is “rappelling down slowly into the abyss” of making an MMO.

The Realtime Worlds story continues to develop, but I can at least appreciate that people are starting to talk about the process via which games are created. Hopefully the industry can start to learn from the mistakes of the past, at least when it comes to company structure and growth. “Go big or go home” is what investors (from VCs to the public markets) seem to want to hear, but that isn’t actually what gives a return on investment in today’s world of rapid change in the gaming space.