By Kieron Gillen on September 8th, 2010 at 10:23 am.
While there’s no news on APB, the BBC broke news yesterday that the administrators of Realtime Worlds have found a buyer for MyWorld. Staff had been kept on MyWorld in hope of them doing exactly that, so you have to chalk this up in the pro column for them. Who’s the buyer? It’s a secret. “One hundred per cent confidentiality has been imposed by the company.” said the administrators about this mysterious American company, “MyWorld has been sold and unfortunately we cannot disclose any further details of the sale.” Who is it? Well, the obvious guess would be someone working in the social-networking sphere though sources speaking exclusively inside our heads tell us it’s the Bavarian Illuminanti. We must ignore the voices, else we kill again.
Right.
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Do you ever feel you’ve missed a joke somewhere?
I do.
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@Meat Circus it originated here.
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The rumour is that Ian Hetherington (RTW chairman) is involved, though isn’t the only investor, though no one I speak to seems to know for sure.
http://www.thecourier.co.uk/Living/Digital/article/4796/former-realtime-boss-ian-hetherington-linked-to-mystery-us-firm.html
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Whats Rome: Total War got to do with this?
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Facebook, it *has* to be Facebook.
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Facebook doesn’t buy games, they just sign exclusive deals with “game”-makers to price-gouge.
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Or google or Microsoft looking at integrating it into their maps.
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I would bet on google. They are buying a lot of games and things related to social networks…
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Once the voices get their kill-lust sated, they can tell you some awesome souffle recipes. Very knowledgeable about Russian mythology too, which is much more interesting than you might think. Seriously, give them a go.
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The idea to “own the world” is what fuel people creating “Internet 2.0 in 3D”. Stuff like Second Life.
Most of these attemps fail because even the most simple videogame has better graphics and usability than Second Life.
“Owning the world” is that fuel these investors ( dream of taxing everything, ala Microsoft XBox Live access ) but now have taste the power of networking and social sites. The urge to do it again, and succed this time has to be gigantic. I hope we don’t have another gold rush, because the one to make another WoW is really sad.
I don’t know how MyWorld can fit in this puzzle, but judging by the videos is about 60% already there, with nice graphics and all. Make it work in Silverlight sandbox, and put it on Facebook, and see if it float. It may not float, … all the old waves of Web 3D failed because even 1992-standard graphics are hard to render with not hardware acceleration. Today we have a lot of people with netbooks, and these machines have really crappy GPU’s. And, if you make MyWorld need a full installation, … will this atract the people you want?, maybe you are limited to share public with Sims or other crap like that, and never achieve FarmVille numbers and public.
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It was most definitely not the Gnomes of Zurich. I attented I party they threw last week, and it was clear that the financial crisis hit them hard. Instead of giving away free platinum bars of chocolate and Cristal champagne (served in bottles made out of real rock crystal collected in the Swiss Alps) like they used to do, it was all just cheap Meat Spritzers and Grosfurters. I tell ya, they couldn’t have afforded it, even if they had wanted to.
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EA
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After their experience publishing APB, I’d be surprised if they came near MyWorld with a barge pole, to be honest.
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Ewige Blummencraft!
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This kind of secrecy stinks of Apple or Activision, I’d say Microsoft if it wasn’t for the fact that Microsoft wouldn’t touch RTW with a barge poll by all accounts.
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Personally, I don’t think it’s any kind of a big name company, but a newly formed company centered around a group of former RTW investors.
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RTW still has investors? :p
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Some people clearly just have money to burn! :)
On a side note, whilst MyWorld had numerous production problems of its own, with the much reduced team size and the razor-like focus that the experience of redundancy brings, I’d expect them not to churn through too much cash before getting something out there.
By my back-of-a fag packet calculations, they can probably fund development for a good year with not too much more than a million dollars, leaving aside data license costs (which I believe were considerable, to be fair, but perhaps have already been purchase) Which is probably chump change to this lot.
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bought by Uwe Boll’s pension fund.
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I bet it’s Google.
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Will the money they got from selling MyWorld go to further improve APB?
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I think I´m playing too much Mass Effect… I actually read “Batarian Illuminati”, despite actually living in Bavaria. (Not an illuminati tough ^^)
I bet the game was bought by an AI, who needs it to spread it´s consciousness throughout the internet.
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Oh look, its a Bavarian Iluminati selling…shoes…
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