Realtime Worldsâ?? Macdonald: We will hold firm

Realtime Worlds studio manager Colin Macdonald has told Develop that the studio will fight on having made deep cuts into its workforce this week.

“We spent a lot of time looking at all the options, and redundancies were the last resort,” he said.

“From a personal point of view, I just want to say how hard this has been for everyone. We’ve prided ourselves on building a fantastic calibre team – and a very close-knit team, and it’s regrettable to let even one of them go.”

Speaking at the end of what had been an emotional week, Macdonald confirmed that the staff cuts were made into the team working on Project Myworld.

“It is Project Myworld,” he said. “As has been the case throughout the history of games development, sometimes it’s impossible to redeploy staff and redundancies are inevitable”.

Rumours surfaced today that suggested Project MyWorld had not been successful in scoring a publishing deal. Macdonald said the group was “still looking at options for it.”

Now shell-shocked by sudden and swift cuts, the group said its focus will be the game which is – demonstrably – pivotal to its future.

“We’ve got the whole team working on making APB as good as it can be,” Macdonald said.

“It’s a shame things haven’t turned out the way we had envisaged them, but then the beauty of online gaming is that we can address problems and keep on improving experiences.

“We’re completely behind APB, it’s got huge potential, and we’ll continue to make new content for it.”