As rumours persist that the Unreal Engine vendor has bought the APB IP
UPDATE: Dave Jones has since contacted Develop, and posted below, to clarify that this story is not true, and that Herald has made a mistake. Jones says he is still living in Dundee with no plans to leave the city currently.
The man who co-founded Rockstar North is rumoured to have left the UK to join Unreal Engine vendor Epic Games.
Dave Jones, who founded Realtime Worlds in 2002, crept out of the public eye over the last two months while his studio fell into administration and eventually closed.
His rumoured escape to the US may see him reunited with his firm’s last project, APB, as last month Epic Games was rumoured to have bought the IP of the failed MMO.
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National newspaper the Herald reports that Jones “has been linked with a senior post at North Carolina-based Epic Games, and is known to be a close friend of its chief executive Mark Rein.”
Develop has contacted Epic Games for clarification on the issue.
It was last month when Epic Games was first approached with rumours that it had bought the APB IP, to which the firm responded: “If any [buyout] talks are going on, then they would be confidential."
Realtime Worlds’ Dundee studio closed last month after buyer interest in the studio failed to materialise into a deal.
Administrator Begbies Traynor said, however, that interest still surrounds the APB IP.
“It is understood that there are a number of companies interested in buying the game,” claimed the Herald report.
“Some are said to want to put it back into development for a few months, while others are said to be interested in the customer-relationship software.
“Begbies is currently carrying out due diligence on various offers and is planning to reach a decision in the coming weeks.”
If suggestions of Epic’s APB buyout turn out to be accurate, then it would be RTW’s second IP to travel across the Atlantic.
Develop revealed last month that an anonymous US company – now claimed to be VC firm New Enterprise Associates – has bought the IP for RTW’s second game Project Myworld.
I'm not shocked to discover that some former RTW employees, for whatever reason, are no longer Dave Jones' biggest fans.
We understand if people are passionately opposed to their former boss, and we will not get in the way of such views being aired, but we cannot condone profane, spiteful or personal attacks on others.
So I've had to delete certain comments.
What a joke. How can someone who wastes millions on a failure of a project walk straight into another job?
They should hire fresh talent.
Not surprising. In this industry upper management is full of people who got their job based on who they know rather than what they have delivered.
Jones had some success with games 15 or more years ago, but is that enough to compete in todays market? 120 staff from RTW trying to their laast months wages paid out would disagree.
Unfortunately the industry (in particular in the UK) is full of overambitious dinosaurs that cling on to development techniques from the 90s and hope that throwing money and overtime at things will solve all problems.
well all I can say to Epic is...lots of luck! The only Time I ever seen Dave anywhere near development on APB was during a photo op for the press. He was completely absent as a driving force, the team recieved little more than misdirection and apathy from him...the only thing he displayed to most people was a complete lack of Imagination and Backbone. He's the antithesis of a good leader and designer. He also knows sweet FA about the actual detail of the construction and tech of the game, so unless he's actually been employed to sit on his hands all day wondering how he got there, I doubt Epic will get a lot for their money...perhaps he's merely making the tea?...I doubt he remembers how to do that either.
I'm still in Dundee and not in any way joining Epic. No idea where that rumour came from.
Dave
With comment No. 5 on this report I think we need the author, Rob Crossley to double check his source and confirm/deny this information.
Personally I loved the IP and followed all the news on it from this very site and would be upset if I find something incorrectly reported on it.
If the story is true I know I wouldn't be happy investing in the product again if Epic have bought it and hired Dave Jones to oversee it. Once bitten twice shy.
I have had separate email from David and IP check backs it up. Updating the original story now.
Just to clarify about 90s style development. this must be divided into 2 halves:-
a. Pre playstation, when we just through more overtime at the project, not more money. This get the best results with a highly commited financially motivated team.
b. Post Playstation, this is when the problems really started.. with inflated development budgets and too many people on the teams with no long term interest in the project.
To increase the chances of success with our development teams we need to bring back the days of royalties and limited development costs and also stop protecting sub-standard employees... excellent games demand excellent commited staff who are prepared to bleed a bit for what they produce and reap the rewards later. It is not fair to expect the good guys in the team to continually carry the slackers and the talentless.
Jon, I agree that we need to shed the "jobs for mates" culture in the Industry, but we also need to get away from the overtime culture whenever and whereever possible.
Too often overtime is used as a way to plug poor management decisions or poor planning. Overtime then becomes seen by management as the norm and the staff that make the effort are seldom rewarded.
I can't think of a single other industry where staff are paid so little and yet have to do so much overtime.
As for the big names, most of them are still living on past glories.
Jon you are spot on when you say that studios need quality people and get rid of people with no talent and who dont pull their weight.
but what if those without talent are in charge? or in positions where they influence or decide direction and scope of projects? the UK games industry has the biggest "jobs for mates" culture i have seen (and i worked abroad extensively) and particularly the older (and more often senior) people in the industry cling on to this notion that UK game devrlopment is still top in world.
There is a reason why the UK is bleeding talent overseas. better pay, better benefits, less overtime and well run projects that people want to identify with.
over here, instead of adapting to modern ways of development and modern ways of treating employees, the old guard of UK dev houses and publishers cries for tax breaks and subsidies to remain competitive and reminiscen about the good old days.
Jon it isn't just a lack of financial motivation. It's also a lack of any creative input & knowing that your work and free time can be thrown away by the most ill thought out and arbitrary decisions taken by people who aren't involved in actual development & have only ascended to their position by dint of being at the company since they left school.
In these circumstances, it's actually less painful to not have a financial interest.
Rant over.
On a slightly different note, I'd say the problem with post playstation development was that the PS2 gen was a tipping point were, due to the sheer potential of the technology, pre-production became vital but that generation of developers, having previously been so limited by technology, found taking creative decisions and imposing limits on yourself before starting production to be an alien concept. Thus, without these self imposed limits, projects sprawled and costs spiraled.
While APB ultimately failed it would have been much, much tougher for RTW to have secured their mammoth investment and create the jobs they did without Dave's name & track record attached.
Clearly a lot went wrong at RTW - Dave has to bear a significant amount of responsibility and undoubtedly his reputation has taken a huge knock.
Nevertheless, it was also down to others to execute his vision and if necessary challenge it.
RTW employed many fantastic people at all levels. The most important outcome is that valuable lessons are learnt by everyone involved to ensure future projects and companies are successful.
@Doesn't Matter: The Architecture industry (which I am part of) is rife with overtime that is used as normal working hours. Nearly every practice I know asks their staff to work overtime unpaid and when it comes down to job losses in the end it's a nice handshake and minimum severance.
@Chris: I agree the Overtime culture needs to be removed and hard working employee's need to be paid for their work fairly.
@David Jones: I think an in depth article with Develop to help explain the surroundings around RTW's and APB's failure would not only help your case but also help others avoid the problems you encountered. What happened with RTW should never be experienced again and if there are lessens to be learned from this for the games industry they need to be taught.
Great point, Matthew - I think there are guilty parties, explicit or not, throughout the RTW story.
@Another Matt (great name)
Your point about making creative decisions early is interesting. The problem with old school developers is most of us are control freaks who struggle with the lack of direct design control in a 3D environment, there seem to be two ways to solve this:-
a. write a collosal desogn document up front, most of which is useless by the time the game is running (no-one has a crystal ball on day 1) and in any case such a doc is never read and broken down properly by all involved in the dev team, leaving designers frustrated by the chinese whispers of misinerpretation and oversight.
b. reserve the right to butt in and change the course of the game when you see it is not quite right.
Unfortuntely neither solution is perfect and the only way is to try and de-control freak yourself a bit.
On the subject of financial incentive, I believe, from personal experience it is good practise to cut everyone in on the success of the product and then push them hard. Unfortunately this model only works well with smaller development teams (ie on smaller formats)
Finally I do agree that everyone on the team should have creative input, as long as it is always up to the creative lead to have final say and channel this into a cohesive final product. Most of us who are any good are all creative in aour own fields and we all need each other to pull hard and have good ideas to create the best end products... and in games the ends nearly always justifies the means if it means getting a good quality, profitable product.
RTW did a bad job at managing dissenters, with the blame for lying with management. Dissenters are very important, because it takes a lot of guts and passion for a project to question the emperor's clothes.
At Google, dissenters are put in charge of analysing the thing they are dissenting about and are expected to make a sensible plan for how to solve the problems they perceive.
I believe it is good to foster a questioning attitude, though it takes maturity to be able to deal with not being some kind of creative or technical god.
Maybe this is a general problem in the industry, I don't have enough experience to say.
Just want to respond to the Matt Hills post.
Yes, RTW would never have gotten funding without Dave Jones. But not based on his track record, rather on the track record of others he has associated himself with. In the early DMA days he had as little to do with the projects as he seemed to at RTW. Teams were given a one page "design" and left to it. The "creator of gta's" involvement was a sentence "race in chase - a pizza delivery game" given to a new team. Further involvement was limited or non existent. He then associates himself with grand theft autos continues success, talking about gta3's development in his keynotes for example. He has left the company before gta3 was in development. Even now, this article calls him "a co founder of rockstar north" while in reality he left many years before rockstar north became rockstar north (in fact setting up Rage scotland - another failed studio)
Dave comes across as a nice guy. But he treats his employees badly whether they realise it or not, taking advantage of anybody he needs to to further himself. He has had very little in the way of creative input or actually any input in the titles he has built his career on since lemmings. It annoys me.
