Realtime Worlds has revealed that APB won't have an overarching narrative, in a developer diary on their offical website. GamerZines investigates what this means for the title and how different story aspects will flow into the main game.
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NowGamer: Realtime Worlds has lifted the lid on its urban crime MMO

Despite letting players run riot, APB still has narrative elements to draw players together. "There's no overarching story that the players will embark on when they play APB. APB is about players creating their own story," explained Realtime Worlds community man Chris Collins in the latest APB vodcast.
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NowGamer: The lead designer on Realtime Worlds' action MMO has confirmed that the game will not appear on consoles initially
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As promised, closed beta invites for Realtime Worlds' massively multiplayer online cops and crooks game APB have been distributed to the registered masses. That means? Check your email!

The EA published PC game is slated for a March 2010 release.
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VG247: Realtime Worlds boss Gary Dale has just confirmed at the Tech Media Invest event in London that APB will go into beta next week.
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In an attempt to kick-start its own video game industry, Ireland has begun to target a number of high-profile Scottish game development studios, attempting to woo them over to the Emerald Isle by offering a five-year tax holiday. Colin Macdonald, manager of Dundee-based APB developer Realtime Worlds, responded by saying "if the package on offer in Ireland was attractive we'd have to give it serious consideration." Other Scottish developers who could be influenced by the tax holiday include Rockstar North, Denki, Ruffian Games and Dynamo Games.
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Realtime Worlds is moving away from the "traditional monthly subscription model" with its upcoming urban PC MMO APB, and the studio has contracted Redwood City-based Vindicia to provide billing services and fraud management.

The game's official FAQ confirms the adoption of a non-traditional revenue model, although it does not specify the terms of payment. The game will, at least in part, be distributed on retail shelves.

According to a statement released today, Vindicia's Cashbox solution will allow the game to support numerous revenue streams, including subscriptions as well as virtual goods and currencies, and will guard against customer fraud, while "optimizing customer acquisition and retention."
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APB, the cops-and-robbers MMO by Crackdown creators Realtime Worlds, will go into closed beta testing within "weeks", a spokesman told Eurogamer at last weekend's Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle.

"We're weeks rather than months away from starting closed beta," community officer Chris Collins told our Tom after showing him an extensive demo of, according to Tom, "slick" gameplay.
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Kotaku: Realtime Worlds is looking for beta testers for their upcoming MMO APB, and you could be one of the few, once you finish filling out one of the more intrusive beta applications we've seen.

The application actually seems like it's part beta tester app, part demographic survey. Along with the normal questions like processor type and testing experience, Realtime is asking for your marital status, number of children per household, and income level, which to me doesn't seem to have a great deal of impact on whether or not you can beta test. Most of it isn't optional, either. You have to select an income range - there is no "No comment" option. The company does at least assure applicants that their information is safe.
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Agent-X from Hiphopgamershow writes:

It appears that the APB application beta is now up and running.
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Eager crooks and crimefighters alike can now sign up for the beta test of Realtime Worlds' highly-anticipated crime MMO, APB.
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PS3Hype writes: 'Today Mike Kebby (PlayStation Store Manager) has revealed that APB is really coming to the PlayStation 3. He says I can't wait for APB...! This means that we maybe see an announcement for APB on the PS3 at the GamesCom 09!'

ABP was frist coming out only on PC and 360 (so 360 exclusive was console exclusive)
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EA to release boxed copy of Realtime Worlds title next year
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Realtime Worlds' Dave Jones hopes characters created in upcoming online action game APB will achieve Fatal1ty-like celebrity status.
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Realtime Worlds creative director Dave Jones sees upcoming PC online action game APB lasting as long as traditional massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft and EverQuest.
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Realtime Worlds boss Dave Jones told VG247 that he'd be disappointed if action MMO APB didn't shift over a million units.
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Upcoming Realtime Worlds MMO APB has cost around $30 million so far, company boss Dave Jones told VG247 at Develop this week, and won't be covered by a "normal" subscription model when it releases next spring.
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Jake Gaskill of G4TV writes:

"Leave it up to Realtime Worlds founder, and Grand Theft Auto creator, David Jones to once again take the familiar concept of an open-world game (that he helped create and refine) and make it feel totally new again. His team's latest effort, the third-person crime MMO APB just looks better and better every time it's shown. Yet until this point, gamers have only had a chance to see bits and pieces, and that hardly makes for extensive drool sessions. Cue to this year's Develop Conference, and Dave Jones' keynote address."
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Dave Jones has quite a resume in the gaming industry, having worked on a variety of franchises from Lemmings to Grand Theft Auto and Crackdown. Speaking at the Brighton Develop conference, the designer said how he is a big fan of users creating their own experiences.

He is, in particular, proud of what Realtime Worlds achieved with the original Crackdown. "We developed the city to function as a platform game, where anything you could see you could climb or jump to," he said. "It had other aspects, too, such as light RPG trappings, but we began to realize that our main innovation was our drop-in, drop-out multiplayer that managed to be successful in an open world."

Still, despite the game's almost unexpected level of success, the return on investment wasn't high. "With Crackdown we sold about 1.5 million copies, but even at that we pretty much only managed to break even," he said. "It was due to the amount of factors that were out of our control as the developer, influences such as GameStop's amazing used-game sales; we know 1.5 million new copies were sold, but it's likely there were 2.5, three million sold when you include used."
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APB developer RealTime Worlds has said that the online market still has a lot of untapped potential and can offer new creative and business opportunities for developers.

Speaking at the Develop conference in Brighton, RTW boss David Jones said the company has assessed all the growing areas in the videogame market – including social, iPhone and Wii gaming – but it became clear that next-gen technology and online opportunities are where "the big dollars are".

"One of the reasons we want to go into the online space is because it opens a wealth of opportunities," said Jones. "Online, as far as I'm concerned, is very, very much untapped. It's kind of like winding the clock back ten or fifteen years. There's a huge amount of scope of online for innovation and for forging genres to really set a bench mark in many different areas."
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