As we recently reported , Realtime Worlds had entered into administration on the back of the poor performance of their urban sandbox MMO, APB. Today, Realtime Worlds released APB's player statistics for the first time, and it's not doing quite as badly as everyone thought.
In the two months since APB was released, the game has gained 130,000 registered players, playing an average of four hours a day. The new figures also give us an insight into the success of APB's unusual pricing scheme. Unlike traditional subsciption MMOs that see players paying a fixed monthly subscription, APB also offers the option of buying hours of game time that can be cashed in whenever the player wants. It also features microtransactions for specific game items. This rakes in $28 a month from the average user, a figure that Joint Administrator Paul Doinis claims to be the "highest of any game out there".
Maths time! Let me just grab the PC Gamer abacus. 130,000 users at $28? That's $3,640,000 a month. Is that really the income of a failing MMO?
EDIT: Fail maths is fail.
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Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.
