They’ll wait to see how the studio builds up the PC game and its services, notes Jones, who also says Xbox Live is off putting to MMO publishers.
”That won’t happen until we have a console publishing partner. That’s the only thing that will trigger that,” Jones explained about a console APB, reports Eurogamer. EA Partners are handling the PC version but they haven’t talked Xbox 360 or PS3 with them.
”I don’t think it’s something we’d say we’d shop around. We’re going to stay heavily focused on building upon what we’ve got. We’ll have conversations with people. If there’s interest there, then of course we’d love to bring it to console.”
They’re wisely sticking with just the PC offering for the time being to make sure it’s refined and keeps players coming back for more online mayhem. Which is exactly what the publishing houses and watching for points out Jones.
”But I think, quite rightly, the console people are sitting there watching how the game does, how we build upon it, how good the service is, what would be the cost involved in running dedicated servers for console, for example, I don’t think anybody’s ever done that yet. There are still a lot of things they have to think about,” said the Realtime boss.
Microsoft’s subscription-orientated Xbox Live doesn’t put Realtime Worlds off but he acknowledges it’s another matter for publishers as they wouldn’t have total control.
”It’s not putting us off,” he said. ”But if there’s a publishing partner out there who says we’d love to do a game with dedicated servers and have a hundred players and actually have some life in the online world, then that I think… It’s difficult for them to make that decision when they don’t have full control over it.”
”At least on PC we had full control. It’s our servers in our data centre and there weren’t any issues.” APB released on PC July 1st in Europe. Check out the trailer.
