Realtime Crisis

In light of what's happened, we need to question just how happy that idea actually is. Nobody is questioning the assertion that making modern games is expensive, but it's not this expensive. APB, in the cold light of day, is not a $100 million game. It's not a $50 million game. It's a much cheaper game - $10, $15 million perhaps - which has exceeded its timescales and its budgets over and over again, and that may well have happened precisely because RTW's success with investors led senior members of the company's staff to feel like they didn't have to worry about time and budgets.

It's tantalising to wonder what would have happened to APB if it had only been able to secure $20 million in funding. With five times less budget, would the project have been abandoned? Or would the pressure have forced the game's management to tighten up their processes, lock down the design in detail and nip impossible ideas in the bud early, and deliver a better game several years earlier? We'll never know, of course, but the reality is that very few of those $100 million can be seen at work in what eventually shipped.

So while it's obvious that investors are going to be much more wary of independent studios in future - and frankly they weren't exactly embracing them with open arms to begin with - it's perhaps less obvious, but even more important, that studios should also be wary of investors, and of drowning their creativity in cash. It sounds like a high-class problem to have, even a slightly funny one, if you're a studio eking out a living on publisher advances - but the joke is probably lost on hundreds of unemployed staff in Dundee today.

Moreover, this whole affair reflects a basic disconnect between investors and gaming tastes. One of the reasons, I suspect, that APB was able to pull in so much investment was simply because it's an investor's kind of game. It's testosterone-filled, action-focused and hugely competitive and combative. It plays to precisely the kind of macho stereotype which many investors have of gaming - and which many investors themselves find attractive.

Yet the reality of gaming's audience is somewhat different. There are, of course, many macho, combative games out there, and many of them are very successful - but studies have suggested that a pretty large majority of gamers are actually more enticed by co-operative, social style play than by direct combat. That's only likely to become more important as gaming's market expands further away from its young male origins.

Hindsight is 20:20, but for exactly that reason, it's also very useful as a learning tool. In hindsight, then, we can see that investors were probably backing RTW for the wrong reasons, that RTW was taking its success with investors as a licence to go over time and over budget, and that the result was a product which cost vast amounts to develop but didn't have much to show for it. Even the most fundamental financial calculations around APB don't make sense - had the game managed to attract a couple of hundred thousand subscribers, a moderate success for an MMO, it's still hard to see how it would ever have recouped its development costs.