Realtime Worlds’ GTA-inspired MMO APB won’t be released in Australia, according to this post at Kotaku Australia.

No, it wasn’t RC’d by the Classification Board – it seems the developer’s convinced the Oz-US latency will make the shooter unbearable. It’s not prepared to cough up the cash to establish local servers and so, the only option left was to not sell it at all.

Fair enough, I say. If I were them, I’d rather put up with six months of angst than five years of it. If Realtime Worlds wants its fill of fanboy ranting about pings, there’s myrid Counter-Strike forums a Google Search away.

I couldn’t tell you the exact costs of getting a server up and running in Australia, let alone the price of ongoing maintenance. I did however rip this comment from the Kotaku post that shines a gilded light on the situation. The context is Heroes of Newerth, but it’s still relevant. Definitive, even:

“We have received some initial prices on hosting boxes in Australia:

Our boxes on average use 4,000-5,000 GB of data transfer a month, we get these boxes for roughly $200 USD each in EU/USA

Provider 1: $1250 per month for hardware, $11,250.00 per month for bandwidth per box, box would support 110 concurrent users
Provider 2: $1100 per month for hardware, $22,500 per month for bandwidth per box, would support about 220 concurrent users.

We have also made inquiries at Internode and are awaiting a quote back from them (it was requested last week Tuesday). So as you can see, the economics of hosting boxes in AU is just not there currently.”

The origin of this information can be tracked down to the Heroes of Newerth forum, and it looks legitimate to me.

Yes, Australia has expensive bandwidth, around four to five times as costly as the US. That’s why we’ll never see local MMO servers. Glad I stopped playing them a year and a half ago.

~ by Logan on June 9, 2010.

Posted in Gaming

Tags: apb, australia, ea, internet, isp, local servers, mmo, online, realtime worlds, world of warcraft