Last week EA officially announced that its upcoming action-based MMO, All Points Bulletin (APB), will not be released in Australia. The reason is simple; APB is an action intensive MMO, meaning it combines the massive open world and huge player populations commonly associated with the likes of World of Warcraft and Guild Wars, with the high-paced action gameplay seen in most online shooters.
To make high-speed shooter gameplay viable on a massive server, EA is assigning regional cluster servers. This means that if you live in the US, or Europe, you are likely to be near a dedicated server, and enjoy the game running at low latencies.
The problem, however, is that these servers need a certain number of players to be viable, from a gameplay as well as a financial point of view. Countries that do not support the necessary populations just won’t get dedicated servers.
If Australia is not deemed worthy of getting its own servers, then it should have been obvious that neither will South Africa. DoGaming journalist Ryan Peter noticed earlier today that various local retailers still have the game available for pre-order, although Kalahari.net recently changed their release date to “out of stock.”
We got in touch with a local EA representative who told us that EA would be releasing an official statement soon. We then spoke to a local distribution network insider, who confirmed that “for now, APB is not coming to South Africa.”
We expect EA to send an email off in the next few days confirming that the game will not ship to South Africa.
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Amended “dedicated servers” to “cluster servers”
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