APB 2021 Roadmap

For the last 2 years, I've done a State of the Game or Roadmap post for APB.

This year, I'm substantially later getting this organized than I wanted to be. For that, I want to apologize.

It started with a bit of extra time off after the holiday to try and decompress from an exhausting year. I chose to do something I rarely do, which is largely disconnect from the computer. When I came back, I immediately jumped into organizing the roadmap post for 2021, but after reviewing my first draft I felt like it was mostly lip service with no actual tactical plan behind it. We hit so many road bumps last year and the year before that, I felt I owed it to the players to take a long hard look at the game and to be 100% honest about its future. That led to quite a bit more research and planning sessions which in turn further delayed this post.

I am not normally absent from the community for what has now been over a month. Truthfully, I've been so busy that I haven't had the time to sort through my forum inbox, read forum messages, or do more than the occasional retweet. As a result, I am certain there are those who immediately leapt to one of several conclusions: (1) the company is shutting down, (2) the company has been acquired, or (3) the game is being shutdown.

I can assure you that none of those things are happening or in the works. So, with sincere gratitude for your guys’ patience, let’s take a look at the results of my deep-dive.

Before I jump into the roadmap itself, I want to briefly look back at some of the tasks we did accomplish last year.

• We formalized Joker Tickets as our in-game paid currency.

• Instead of forcing players to go to our website for paid purchases, we launched the in-game Joker Store and added hundreds of items for purchase, including guns, clothing, and vehicles.

• We added bundled items to the Joker Store that automatically adjust their price based on items you already own.

• We revamped how some purchases are delivered to player accounts so they don’t need to be kept around when not in use.

• We removed Joker Mystery Boxes and created an entirely new rental system for getting Legendary guns with Joker Tickets.

• And we added ways for players to earn Joker Tickets to finally make the game truly free to play with all content available to all players.

We’ve come a long way, but there is still a lot to do with APB. It would be disingenuous to talk about the good without acknowledging the bad, so I also took a moment to review some of our problem areas.

With our focus entirely on the new engine and on the transforming our store, we were largely unable to produce new content or new events. I think players would have tolerated that better had the new engine come out, but to-date we still haven't launched APB 2.1, and we haven’t seen the progress we were hoping for in our Open Betas. In addition, 2020 was a difficult year for Little Orbit overall. We still have a major project that cost the company millions of dollars held up in litigation, and while the APB playerbase grew dramatically over the summer, we ended the year at an all-time low concurrency.

So, that is where we are. Now, here is what we plan to do about it.