Redundancies At Real Time Worlds

Sad news broke on Friday. Firstly, with rumours that in addition to previously announced scaling back of the APB team post-launch, the whole team of the recently announced Social Networking Game MyWorld would be laid off. Later, speaking to Develop, Studio Manager Colin Macdonald confirmed that the further redundancies had been made, and that those cuts were made to the MyWorld team, but stopped short of saying the project was cancelled and they "were still looking at options for it." However, APB would continue...

As McDonald said to Develop...

“We’ve got the whole team working on making APB as good as it can be,” Macdonald said.

“It’s a shame things haven’t turned out the way we had envisaged them, but then the beauty of online gaming is that we can address problems and keep on improving experiences.

“We’re completely behind APB, it’s got huge potential, and we’ll continue to make new content for it.”

Speaking to Edge Online, it seems that the people they couldn't move from MyWorld have been made redundant - though exact numbers are lacking at present.

There's two messages I'd take away from this. Firstly, that the company have strimmed back a future project implies that there was trouble securing a deal and there was no way to support the time at present. Secondly, it puts the future of the company in APB and making it work. While all of RPS were disappointed with APB, it'll be interesting to see how it'll continue to develop from here. I hope everyone released lands safely soon.