The chaps from Slightly Mad Studios (Need For Speed Shift, Shift 2) got in touch to let us know about their latest project, which is ambitious and then ambitious again. They’re making a new racing game called “Community Assisted Racing Simulation” or C.A.R.S. for short, and they’re doing it with a full-on crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding portal, World Of Mass Development. Their plan is to prove that the concept of getting the wider gaming community to help out actually developing games is workable by doing it with their next racing game, and they’ll be opening it up to other projects at the same time. Yours, maybe. They’ve even got the man who was Stig on Top Gear, Ben Collins, to help out for some reason.

I spoke to Slight Mad’s Ian Bell about the project in more detail below, and he explains where they idea came from and where he hopes it is going to. You can also check out the site here.



RPS: What was the motivation for your guys to WMD and how did you come up with the idea?

Bell: The initial motivation grew from a frustration with the current publisher/developer setup that sees top quality games not being made because publishers have mostly consolidated on their proven brands and cut back drastically on the acquisition or development funding of new game ideas. There was also some annoyance in the fact that large publishers have an enormous cost base which must be paid for out of the sale of the products the developer breaks their backs making. Out of this traditional funding system the developer ends up doing the lion’s share of the work and gets the least on the backend. The developer actually gets a loan from the publisher to cover development costs, pays this loan back as ‘advance against royalties’ meaning that with the huge cost base mentioned above hard earned potential royalties disappear into a black hole. The idea grew out of a wonder as to why this isn’t happening already. With our system we provide 100% transparency to the team members who purchase tools to be part of the project. They see every aspect of development in detail, steer the design and feature list, can provide art and support and importantly, are an ongoing source of QA and marketing (the two things which the publisher provided before). I saw no reason why this should be the case.

RPS: What sort of games do you think will benefit from the WMD approach?

Bell: I think all types of games. Initially the system is most appropriate for AAA developers with a good history that can’t get the publishers to back the product for development as they all have cold feet right now.

RPS: From what I understand, this isn’t Kickstarter and you’re hoping people will help with more than just cash? How exactly will people be able to contribute to development? Can you flesh out the sort of things you expect people to do?

Bell: Right. This system is a form of both crowd sourcing and crowd funding. Crucially, the people who join up will get paid back for their input when the product sells. At a basic level we expect people to play the game and engage on the development forums in whatever form suits them. Some ‘team members’ might mainly want to play and post their opinions, others might get more into finding bugs and yet others might want to provide art assets or script based features (we’ve developed our own scripting system for this which we’ll ship to team members in the near future).

RPS: Will people who have done work via WMD get a credit for it? (I’m thinking about budding devs who want to add something to their CV here.)

Bell: All of those that join will get credit and we also have a system for the public to promote individuals they feel deserve to be in a higher member tier (and thus get more fees when the profits come in). As we won’t be paying staff monthly I don’t see it sustaining people in terms of a steady income but it is certainly a nice addition to anyone’s CV.

RPS: When will the first playable build of C.A.R.S. be available for people to tinker with?

Bell: We’re having a soft beta launch today with restricted numbers to test the systems on backup servers (read: slow download!) before we go live on the main servers.

RPS: Thanks for your time.

Full announcement jabber: