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The demise of developer Realtime Worlds is something of a seismic shock for the UK games business, and especially for the town of Dundee - one of the locations where game development has particularly thrived in this country over the past decade.
In the immediate term, it means that hundreds of developers are out of work. The human cost of a company of this size collapsing is immense. Families will be uprooted and relocated, and some will struggle to keep their heads above water, especially since the firm apparently lacks the funds required to pay wages and redundancy packages.
In the longer term, however, I suspect that the impact of RTW's demise will be felt by the UK games business for many years to come. The company's failure is not entirely a shock - it launched an MMO-style game which was hugely expensive to develop, but which received poor reviews, a combination which would be a fatal blow to most game companies. The scale of the failure, and the context in which it has happened, however, will have a major impact on how the industry does business.
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Today's feature
Realtime Crisis
The collapse of Realtime Worlds is going to have an impact on UK development for years to come.
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