Realtime Worlds announced the closing of All points bulletin (APB) today and many people won't to know where things went wrong. Where did the $100 million in development funds go? How did we reach this point where the company now sits in administration with many of its workers laid off and now the company's top title is going bye bye? Former APB staff member Luke Halliwell offers up his thoughts on what happened on his Weblog.
The work environment is touched on as not seemingly too pleasant and at times almost discouraging people from going that extra mile. Halliwell explains the method implemented for bug reporting among the QA team and the explanation casts the procedure as quite ineffective and even notes one instance of an QA employee being berated for emailing a summary of possible bug forum posts to the team.
The really sad part is that, more often than not, we prevented or discouraged such people from helping out by building these bizarre internal divisions between groups. I think this was a misguided attempt to imitate how other big online games run things. For example, I once heard one of our fine QA staff being berated for wait for it emailing a summary of forum activity around QA. This guy had gone through every single forum post looking for complaints that might signify bugs, and summarised it in a plan of action for the QA team to investigate further. Commendable stuff indeed, but here he was, being told that ONLY OUR DEDICATED COMMUNITY TEAM were allowed to summarise forum activity for others (usually in the form of a number from 1-100 representing how favourable forum feedback was that week. Never found out how they computed that or what we were supposed to do with it.)
Halliwell followed up his first post with Part 2, which detailed some of the problems that came with Realtime Worlds newly found funding, which seemed to bring with it a slew of new problems and mismanagement. He explains that Realtime Worlds took an approach to each problem by throwing more people at it, which created inefficiencies all over the place, which led to more people being hired and actually negatively affected the work environment and decimated motivation. Ultimately, there was a culture clash between members of the company that Halliwell simply refers to as Red, being the segment that wanted the company to become more corporate, and Blue, being the segment that was opposed to the idea and in some cases other ideas from Red.
Opposed to Red was a group that for the sake of argument well call Blue, with diametrically opposed views. Quietly and subtly, perhaps without many in the organisation noticing, these two groups fought for the companys culture. Ultimately the Blues were destroyed. While probably numerically greater, they held less org-chart power and were forced to work hard for even small concessions. And while the Red relished the meetings and political fighting, the Blue were passionate about getting on with real work, about making our product better, and for the most part gave up the fight to focus on that. The Red werent averse to dirty tricks either, such as paying a key Blue to leave (thats org-chart power for you).
Halliwell details the numerous new barriers that were established from new hires and how it impacted development. But he notes one especially detrimental organization that was established called "business" and "development", which only served to make the problem worse because Halliwell states that they constantly shut the team down any time they inquired about financial related features that might need to be implemented into the game to save money. But it appears the problem even extended beyond that.
In Part 3, Halliwell touches on the complacency that followed the company's acquisition of new funding and how it served to be a drag shoot for development and ultimately led to the layoffs earlier this year following APB's launch.
We were complacent about business planning, deciding to spend all our investment getting APB to launch, assuming that we would sell zillions of copies and over-spending on server hardware. When we were told we were being made redundant, we were told something along the lines of the market is just so bad right now we could never have predicted this even our worst sales projections were so much higher than this. I think that was supposed to be consolation but it was just complacent, and dumb.
You can read each article in its entirety on Luke Halliwell's Weblog. The three links are listed below for your convenience.
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