EA Partners signed-up makers in a deal confirmed during the publisher's E3 conference, and RTW boss Dave Jones clearly believes things are now falling into place for the gangland MMO.

Speaking ahead of a GameHorizon speech, Jones said he is "very, very happy" with APB - the game now being played internally ahead of an early 2010 debut.

"We're looking at a launch date of early 2010 - we've got the partnership with Partners cemented, because we knew we'd need to start building presence at retail, marketing-wise. And we've signed a deal with a company on the hosting side - so everything's going really well."

The veteran game maker is confident of big things from the title: "We're playing the game every day now, hosted internally - obviously it's a company first, we've never done anything like this before, but overall I think everybody's pretty confident that we'll have a successful launch."

More on APB soon.

By Luke Guttridge