What happened? Reading the responses from Slightly Mad Studios about the Wii U version of is frustrating, maddening and comes across with an air of aloofness the likes of which we would expect from an AAA publisher.
[Update: The quote actually came from an authorized Project CARS fan page, not the official page. Some individuals close to the project have stated that Slightly Mad Studios have still not made an official statement on the matter. The original individual who did make the statement(s) has removed the page.]
Original article:
Nintendo Enthusiast spotted the quotes from Slightly Mad Studios on a [community] Facebook page. It’s not pretty and the fan response is equally ugly. Here’s what they had to say in regards to the recent delay that Bandai Namco originally issued regarding the release of on the Wii U…
[EDIT: These are comments from the author/owner of the PCARS community fan page and not SMS]
By the depths of Kratos’ languishing fart in Tartarus… what the fu– really?!
So they expect the people who helped fund the game for a system that doesn’t have any realistic racing sims, to wait up to a year for a game that’s releasing on consoles right in the thick of competition against and ? Seriously?
Slightly Mad Studios’ response is actually, in my opinion, worse than Bandai Namco’s. At least in the latter’s case it came across as cold, calculating and everything we would expect from a publisher.
The other problem is that the Wii U and PC version had an entire year-head start on the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game. I’m just trying to understand how it was prioritized that the Wii U is the last to get the game after having an extra year on the design table? Whether it has difficult architecture or not, how does a year head-start require an extra year to finish over the other platforms? Really?!
I think a lot of the situation was summed up nicely by Daniel Garfunkiel, who stated that…
I really respected Slightly Mad Studios for their grassroots approach to crowd-funding the game specifically within the racing sim community. I thought they were smart about how they attracted funding for the game and how they really opened up to allow the community to do most of the marketing for them. Heck, they didn’t actually start promoting their own game with official trailers until this spring. All before then it was the work of the die-hard community pumping out screenshots and trailers to hype up and pump up the game’s presence within the gaming news circles.
The fact that the delay came directly after Bandai Namco got involved – because obviously, if the game wasn’t going to hit the November release for the Wii U, they could have made this fact known in regular updates well beforehand – has led many gamers to question the authenticity of the Wii U’s architecture really being that different and difficult to work with. I mean, it’s not like the Cell and its additional SPUs on the PS3.
Many fans have opted to believe that due to Slightly Mad Studios’ reticence about the Wii U version before this whole event transpired, that Nintendo’s console was put on the back burner for the PS4 and Xbox One version, especially considering that the promo material for this spring mostly contained a lot of footage from the PS4 build.
Amanda Thebabyhedgehog had an interesting way of putting it, stating that…
The big difference between Slightly Mad Studios and the other big publishers is that the former isn’t in a position to piss off their community, because those are the people who will make the game sell and those are the people who will use word-of-mouth to market the game for the company.
EA and Ubisoft can afford to piss off hardcore gamers and then advertise their junk to casuals who don’t know any better. Slightly Mad Studios can’t afford the luxury of selling a turd in a bag with a flashy $100 million dollar advertisement campaign. They have to deliver what they promised to the people who paid for that promise.
As for on the Wii U… there’s just no guarantee what the game will turn out like with a 2015 release on the table. We’re looking at a scenario all over again, and fans are not liking it one bit at all. The real question is, will gamers rebel by forfeiting a purchase of on the PS4 and Xbox One as a form of protest or will they cave and continue to feed the machine that powers third-party neglect for the Wii U?
