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APB's Walter Kong on financial flexibility
In a new interview with Walter Kong, the Senior Vice President of Business Development at Realtime Worlds, explains the logic behind his team's recent reacquisition of the publishing rights for their upcoming game All Points Bulletin. Their latest round of fund-raising, which netted them a cool $50 million, gives them the a much higher degree of flexibility than they would have had under Webzen, so they took the opportunity to go independent, for a while anyway.Kong explained that just because that just because they moved out from under Webzen doesn't mean they are necessarily looking to self-publish; they just want to keep their options open. What seems clear from the way they've handled themselves so far is that all the veteran blood, including CEO David Jones -- the brainchild of the Grand Theft Auto series, has made them shrewd in the ways of the business. Here's hoping they're as savvy at making their game as they are financing it.
Rockstar founder calls GTA MMO "the Holy Grail"
In case you haven't seen it, Crispin Boyer of EGM sat down for an interview with Rockstar founder Sam Houser to talk in-depth about all things Grand Theft Auto. In addition to some tasty preview bits, Boyer raked Houser over the coals a little bit, trying to glean from him what the future of the franchise might be. In terms of multiplayer, Houser didn't shy from expressing his enthusiasm for the idea of a GTA MMO. Specifically, he said such a title, "is very, very doable and is a very, very compelling proposition." In a subsequent question he refers to a mainstream subscription-based MMO on a console as "the Holy Grail."The problem, as Houser sees it, is in combining the GTA gameplay with the idea of a persistent world. Without the right constraints, the game might amount to little more than a city of a couple thousand players all shooting at each other with rocket launchers, instead of an interesting, compelling MMO experience. From the tenor of his comments, it doesn't seem like Houser and Rockstar currently have any specific plans for an MMO just yet, but we imagine they're going to be paying very close attention to Realtime Worlds' All Points Bulletin when it comes out later this year, as its 'cobs and robbers' gameplay is the closest to GTA we've seen yet.
