RTW needs partner to do console APB

Dave Jones has told Eurogamer that Realtime Worlds will need to find a publishing partner in order to do a console version of APB.

"That won't happen until we have a console publishing partner. That's the only thing that will trigger that," Jones explained in a wide-ranging interview published this morning.

Despite EA Partners assisting with retail distribution of the PC version, Jones said that he hadn't had any conversations with EA about a console release.

"I don't think it's something we'd say we'd shop around. We're going to stay heavily focused on building upon what we've got. We'll have conversations with people. If there's interest there, then of course we'd love to bring it to console.

"But I think, quite rightly, the console people are sitting there watching how the game does, how we build upon it, how good the service is, what would be the cost involved in running dedicated servers for console, for example, I don't think anybody's ever done that yet. There are still a lot of things they have to think about."

Jones also denied that the difficulties in getting a massively-multiplayer game off the ground on Microsoft's subscription-based Xbox Live service was holding up console plans.

"It's not putting us off," he said. "But if there's a publishing partner out there who says we'd love to do a game with dedicated servers and have a hundred players and actually have some life in the online world, then that I think... It's difficult for them to make that decision when they don't have full control over it. At least on PC we had full control. It's our servers in our data centre and there weren't any issues."

The full interview with Realtime Worlds CEO Dave Jones, in which we discuss APB's mixed reception among critics and plans to reinvent it through content updates, is online today.