APB Reloaded owner gets £125,000 for Scottish studio

The new owner of the APB game has been handed £125,000 to open a new 22-man studio in Scotland.

Original owner Realtime Worlds closed last year after a disastrous launch period following a long development timeframe and huge costs.

After picking up the rights to the game, K2 Network, which owns Reloaded Productions, told GamesIndustry.biz that it would consider a Scottish office to act as a European base.

The funding comes from Scottish Development International, with Edinburgh the base for the new studio.

"I am delighted that Reloaded Productions will establish a studio in Edinburgh rather than creating jobs only in its existing locations in Irvine, California and Bangalore, India," said Fiona Hyslop, Scottish Culture minister

"It is testament to the talent, infrastructure and cutting-edge skills Scotland has to offer in this fast-growing and competitive market and our continued promotion of this key sector internationally."

Bjorn Book-Larson, CEO of Reloaded Productions added: "After visiting Scotland, meeting some extraordinary game development professionals and also seeing the Scottish Government's enthusiastic support for creative and technical ventures, we decided to invest in a Scottish team focused on the core game engineering and key creative design tasks.

"Our hope is to expand the Scottish presence and increase the size of the team over time as we add more creative game projects as part of our global MMO development efforts."

Initially a subscription MMO game, APB Reloaded will now adopt a free-to-play model.