Ex-RTW staff offered re-employment [UPDATED]

Begbies Traynor, the acting administrator for stricken Dundee studio Realtime Worlds, has announced that 23 members of the 60-strong team that had been working on recently-announced RTW title ‘Project MyWorld’ have been offered their jobs back.

“As a smaller entity MyWorld is attracting considerable interest from potential buyers and 23 members of the team who had been working on the project clearly add value to it as a standalone business,” said joint administrator Ken Pattullo.

“Hence the fact we have been able to offer a limited number of those jobs back.”

Trade creditors in the UK are owed somewhere in the region of £3m from RTW. The hope now seems to have sprung that some of this money can be made back through buyers on both sides of the Atlantic whose interest, Begbies Traynor say, has been piqued by APB and its follow-up title.

“We want to offer reassurance to gamers that APB will not only continue as an online service but will be improved and supported 100 per cent during restructuring,” Pattullo added.

Both Pattullo and joint administrator Paul Dounis met SNP MP for Dundee East Stewart Hosie and Dundee East MSP Shona Robison today. Pattullo described the meeting as “very useful.”

“Overall, we are cautiously optimistic,” he concluded.

UPDATE

According to a source on GI.biz, it is now believed that a new studio may be being formed around Project MyWorld, with the 23 re-hired staff and a figure "with an existing relationship with Realtime Worlds" running the project from the current RTW Dundee studio.

The identity of the potential buyer is as yet unknown, but events suggest that Ian Hetherington and Dave Jones are behind the move to consolidate the new studio behind the project, originally slated for a spring 2011 release.