All Points Bulletin Shuts Down Its Servers

All Points Bulletin Shuts Down Its Servers
An MMO falls in the forest.

Chrono Trigger is a classic game; some would say that it numbers among the best games of all time. When re-released on the Nintendo DS in 2008, Chrono Trigger sold thousands of copies and was critically acclaimed as one of the best RPGs of the year. Critics were not, however, raving about another Role-Playing-Game that came out on the same month in 1995: The Realm Online. The Realm was one of the first massively multiplayer online games to be released, but despite breaking ground in this multimillion dollar genre, The Realm Online has fallen into an obscurity that is not uncommon for games of its type. At the end of the day, MMOs are one of the most transitory forms of video game entertainment on the market today.

The careful balance that online games must overcome has recently been exemplified by the closing of All Points Bulletin, an online game for the PC. If you haven't heard of APB, you may forgive yourself: it was only launched this June. In the short span of three months, APB ran its course and servers were disconnected on the 23 of September, leaving customers without a game to play. The developer, Realtime Worlds (the company behind the first Crackdown game), ran into financial trouble while creating APB and their assets are currently being prepared for liquidation. Those of us who were unlucky enough to pick up the game, which got poor to middle-of-the-road reviews from most outlets, were left with nothing but a worthless disc and an empty wallet.

This unfortunate circumstance highlights a key problem with the idea of the MMO. In a hundred years, someone can pick up a copy of Halo and, providing that there are any functioning Xbox consoles, can still play the single-player portion of the game. Online-only games, like APB, are limited the availability of other players and servers to host the game. In a hundred years, not even the enormously popular World of Warcraft will be functioning.

When Realtime Worlds put out All Points Bulletin, they needed a major seller in order to keep the company in the black: what they needed was a large group of first-adopters. The problem with this plan is that first-adopters tend to be burned when games fail or turn out to be unpopular; many people who have been first-adopters in the past, will wait to see if a game is a success before they purchase a new release. Now this strategy might be good for the individual, but things quickly spiral downward if a large number of people take this course of action. To illustrate, check out the figure below.



This construct is a classic Nash equation from the field of Game Theory, a portion of science dedicated to studying the way humans cooperate. In the situation above, it would seem like your best option would always be to wait for the game: you can always get it later if things work out, and if they don't work out, you haven't wasted any money. In reality, however, if everyone takes the optimal path, events will end up in the bottom-right corner, where businesses fail and people lose jobs. Sometimes, people stay in the top-left box, this outcome may be influenced by hype, quality, community, or any of a long list of other factors. In the end, though, the first box would probably have been better for everyone.

So, whose fault is it that Realtime Worlds had to close its doors? I'm afraid that not even game theory can lay the principle blame on anyone but Realtime Worlds itself. MMOs are constantly facing the Nash equations, and some of them win out. Starting up an online game is never going to be easy, but hinging the future of your company on the success of an online game is a recipe for disaster. Giving a game three months of support will never be enough time to let it show its true colors. APB is just another casualty in a fight for the subscription fees of the masses; rest in peace, All Points Bulletin. Sometimes it's not all fun and games in the video game business.

--Tom

Picture credit: www.guardian.co.uk