APB's Voice Chat To Feature Adverts

24 Jun 2010 at 19:30:36 by Peter Parrish

Just days before the All Points Bulletin (APB) launch date, beta testers and community members have discovered a previously unannounced in-game advertising 'feature,' as Massively reports.

An alert-eyed player spotted the curious "VOIP Premium" button (which offers a payment option to remove ads from the in-game voice chat for either 30, 90 or 180 days) inside the account management page and alerted the APB forums. As this was the first time they'd heard about it, they were far from impressed.

At this point, a Realtime Worlds community manager stepped in to clarify the system. According to his post, a short radio ad will play every three hours in the game, and will only be heard when entering a new district.

While that doesn't seem too obtrusive, the players are still wondering why this was not made public knowledge by the developers themselves.

This incident follows some controversy over Realtime World's initial review embargo for APB, which stated that no reviews could be published until a full week after the US release date of 29 June. When this was questioned by the press, the review embargo was moved forward from 6 July to 2 July, in line with the UK release date.

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