Reloaded Productions is the team behind the resurrected and re-imagined APB: Reloaded title, which hit the market last December.
The game took the core of the late, not incredibly lamented APB and redeveloped it as a digital only free-to-play title. In the first few weeks, the game attracted over 3,000,000 players and has been generating revenue from in-games sales of virtual goods, since its re-release.
Now the company behind the game has appointed Michael Boniface as its new European Managing Director. Michael will be responsible for all business operations in Europe, as well as increasing the company’s presence in markets such as Asia and Latin America.
Reloaded has been overlooked to a degree over the last 12 months or so. Many people still write off APB as a historic relic. Yet a growing number of developers – and titles – are recognising that the free-to-play business model may form a significant part of their business in the future. APB: Reloaded is finding new players and fans all around the world, as more and more people find their PC has the specification to cope with the game’s demands and the team has clearly found a business model that encourages players to part with cash for virtual goods.
Congratulations to Michael. Congratulations to the rest of the team at Reloaded. We’re looking forward to seeing what you come up with next.
Reloaded is recruiting. You can find the latest positions on our JOBS page.
Re-imagined APB: Reloaded? The content is exactly the same. Has the writter of this article played it recently and did he or she play it on release?
Writer even
Yes. Played it. Also spoke to the team about what they did to turn it into a free2play title. There are definitely changes in there and the focus has changed from the original…
90% of the content and game play remain completely unchanged so their refocus has been marketing rather than fundimental changes to the game and content that already existed and quite a few people worked on for up to eight years.
There should be praise for the Reloaded team as they have done what should have been done in the first place and done it well. But to call it re-imagined and not just repackaged and tuned is just not Cricket.
I think that’s unfair. The team clearly had to make numerous changes to turn the game into a free to play title. They did an interview with VentureBeat which explains what’s been done and what their plans are: http://venturebeat.com/2012/06/15/apb-reloaded-turning-a-game-that-killed-a-studio-into-a-success/
Yes they made changes to the payment model and sorted out some annoying bugs but to say its a re-imagined is wrong Brian. It took the content and hit the ground running with that.
Jim, I’m not an expert. I’m going by the information I could find on the changes made. From what I’ve been able to find, the Reloaded team made several changes to change the match-making and way the early missions were introduced, not to mention a new game mode. So I thought that ‘re-imagined’ was fair enough with regard to that. If you disagree, fair enough.