Realtime Worlds Creative Director, Dave Jones sat down with Videogamer.com for an interview. In the interview, Mr. Jones states he expects APB to last a good five to ten years. They intend to do this by drawing on the kinds of gameplay that kept Counter Strike players coming back for years and years (even until now) and by coupling that with the social aspects an FPS game like Counter Strike just couldn't do.

“That’s ultimately the goal,” he told us when asked if he saw APB being around for five or ten years.
However, Jones, who created Lemmings, Grand Theft Auto and Crackdown, said that he believed fans will stick around not for the same reasons as MMORPGs, but for reasons akin to Valve’s enduring online FPS Counter-Strike.
“The method I looked at, the kind of ideas I looked at was more like Counter-Strike,” he said. “There is a game which kept people playing for years and years and years, but from a very, very different perspective - just a great, great, great core combat game. I want more of what Counter-Strike did coupled with the social stuff that Counter-Strike didn't do. You couldn't even have a clan in Counter-Strike for heaven's sake. People used to improvise by adding it to the end of their names. They had to try and organise when to meet up, try and form groups, they effectively ran their own server then and invited players to it - all that stuff Counter-Strike players were doing, they had to try and do off their own back.
Read the full interview over at Videogamer.com.