How Project CARS Raised $5 Million Without Kickstarter

Slightly Mad Studios’ Project CARS is a gorgeous, as you can see above, crowdfunded racing game. In three years it’s already raised $5 million and has a community of 85,000 players through its own World of Mass Development portal.

Would it have done better through Kickstarter? Slightly Mad’s Andy Tudor recently told Gamsutra why he thinks the WMD portal was better for the game.

“Kickstarter is great, but it doesn’t allow the same level of day-to-day interactivity and behind-the-scenes access to the development team that we chose to allow with the WMD Portal,” said Tudor. “You’re usually reliant on irregular updates to get any kind of insight into progress on the project.”

“If anything,” he adds, “it shows that gamers were eager and looking for something like this regardless of ‘crowdfunding’ being in the populist lexicon at the time.”

Tudor said that by crowdfunding, and by involving the fans in the process, Project CARS has been able to get the kind of attention big budget rivals like Ubisoft’s The Crew have to pay big bucks for.

“We’ve been making the game in full public view for three years now,” Tudor reasons. “There are thousands of YouTube videos of people playing the game already – both from gamers and professional drivers – there are hundreds of thousands of screenshots out there, we’ve been covered by hundreds of magazines and websites, gamers are talking about us on forums and social media, we’re appearing at major exhibitions and conferences. And we haven’t spent a single penny on marketing.”

“Everything you’ve seen about Project CARS has come from either a fellow gamer that’s played it or from the mouths of one of the development team,” he adds. “There’s no middle management filtering what you see.”

There’s more about Project CARS, and its sister project World of Speed, in the full interview.

The post How Project CARS Raised $5 Million Without Kickstarter appeared first on Racing Game Central.

Continue reading...