The APB developer could still be rescued from the brink of collapse, but may no longer be British-owned
Beleaguered Dundee studio Realtime Worlds may be taken out of administration at the hands of a foreign company, Develop has learned.
The distinguished development house, which employed over 200 staff at the beginning of the month, was yesterday taken into administration following “lacklustre” demand for its latest title APB.
But early signs are positive for the company – Develop has been told that Realtime Worlds is receiving high levels of interest “from both sides of the Atlantic”.
Administrator Begbies Traynor is now carefully looking through the company’s books, while also deliberating on what it yesterday said was “inevitable redundancies”.
[Update: Joint administrator Paul Dounis, of business rescue group Begbies Traynor, confirmed that at least one US company is interested in buying the Dundee studio.
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However, he added that there is interest from UK studios as well.
”We are actively pursuing all these expressions of interest which have come from both the UK and US,” he said.]
Begbies Traynor also confirmed that 157 staff at Realtime Worlds had been made redundant in a bid to steer the firm back to good health.
The overseas interest in Realtime Worlds is reminiscent of the same early interest shown in Nottingham studio Free Radical Design – which went bust in December 2008 and was bought by Germany-headquartered outfit Crytek.
At 8.30pm yesterday the administrators met with representatives for the MyWorld Team.
They were informed that the project would carry on but with a skeleton crew so that the IP can be sold to an interested party.
This interested party will try and complete the deal this weekend for the IP and also the reduced team of 20.
This certain interested party was also interested about a month ago just after we were told our jobs were at risk.
The interested party is also associated with some of the board members of Realtime Worlds and is in fact one of them.
So not only have they made 40 people redundant on the MyWorld team, they have not paid us for this month!
We are not getting any actual money from Realtime Worlds yet they are still operating and we have to go to the government and fill in forms which will take months we are only going to get around £380 statutory redundancy for each year served and they can’t even do the decent thing and pay us what we are owed.
We are unlikely to get paid from the sale of the IP as this will go back to the other shareholders that got ripped off when they spent all the money.
They will move the team to another location and set up shop under a new name like nothing happened in the next 4 weeks.
A similar thing this afternoon for APB, they are keeping a team of around 40 people to make sure they can sell it if they can.
I have no money to feed my family next week, I cannot pay my mortgage. Yet they can play trading the IP game like ping pong and destroy our lives.
So when they sell it they will be hailed as the saviors of the RTW team as they helped save the 20 jobs on MyWorld and the 40 or so on APB yet these are the same people that destroyed RTW in the first place and left us without our wages or notice money.
They don't care about any of the staff!
