APB's voice chat feature will contain advertisements

Personally, I have no problem with this. A 10 sec ad during a loading screen isn't going to turn me off to the game, so long as the game is fun to play. Loading screens are already meta-game, so no immersion problem there. The ads only play once every three hours, which is actually pretty long. I'd be fine with it playing on each loading screen.

Is anyone really shocked that Realtime Worlds would be looking at alternate revenue streams? Especially considering all of the problems recently released MMO's have been having?

Among two very glaring failings in this want to be MMO, they are inserting adverts? Bahahaha. The icing is so sweet i need a cup of spite to wash it down....

This premium VOIP service is just the crux of what appears to be Realtime Worlds attempts at money-grubbing. I enjoyed the game, and would buy the $50 box copy, but the game is not set up in such a way as to justify a subscription, or even hour-by-hour payment plan.

There is not enough content, and the world is not nearly large or open enough to justify paying for access to the servers. Global agenda, a game with a somewhat similar server set up, has gone subscription free, and that game has tons more content and massively multiplayer elements to it than APB at its best moments. Were the game sans subscription, I wouldn't mind in the least in-game billboards and the occasional audio advertisement. Hopefully they will realize their folly and correct this scheme once they start hurting for capital.

lol thats funny its a p2p game and they are making you listen to advertisements I have seen adverts in f2p games but this is just cheap and unclassy

If you people are just knee jerk reacting to this news post and not actually educating yourself on what's happening, then your curmudgeony tightfisted opinions don't really amount to much more than a pile of some poo

actually when cable first came out it was suppose to be an add free way to watch tv. you pay for the channels so you dont have to watch ads. 2 years later half of the channels had ads 3 years after that all but the subscription ones had them, 4 years after that there where channels that leased there channel to paid ads at night. and no i do not watch / pay for cable. I refuse to be a sheep. every person who pays for cable should stop and realise they where lied to and manipulated.

If it's anything like the quality of native voice chat in most other games, people will just shut it off and us vent anyway.

I’d be fine with it if they hadn’t reneged on their free to play promise.

Asking me to pay for hours or pay a monthly fee for what is essentially an mmo gta3 clone with extreme customization is a tall order in and of itself. But if I *were* inclined to pay for the game, I would be seriously pissed if I were stuck with ads. Generally you pay the premium for the ad-free version of just about anything on the internet. Paying the premium (after they promised we wouldn’t have to) AND getting spammed by Suicide Girls ads is over the top.

I did play the beta, and the game is fun, if limited. The customization sets the bar a notch higher, and is really the selling point. The lag, the repetition, the lack of hitboxes in a shooter (early 90s style!), the unfair pairings, and the weird lack of immersion (you can drive right through epic gun battles but cannot influence any of it) are the drawbacks.

But I’m not paying $10/mo to listen to advertising. Truthfully, I wasn’t going to pay to play based solely on the merits of the game, but to me this is another nail in the coffin of their extremely confused business model. F2P sounded great – and supporting your servers with ads is just fine (although I prefer the Guild Wars model where you just sell valuable content and people are happy to buy expansions, new chapters, microtransactions, whatever). Paying a monthly fee, or paying per hour (an interesting if super retro move), are also reasonable models. But together it just seems greedy, and this particular game isn’t worth putting up with both.