As oval racers continue to face a paucity of options for their preferred breed of racing, Project CARS appears to be providing another kick in the pants.
This is more than disappointing. Project CARS was crowd funded (CARS stands for Community Assisted Racing Simulator) and American style oval racing was promised at the outset. Slightly Mad Studios raised more than 3.1 million dollars to develop the simulation, but also contributed over 2 million dollars themselves.
According to a source reporting to pretendracecars.net, Slightly Mad Studios have been “pussyfooting around” with the release of the oval tracks.
When asked if the oval tracks would be put into the game, Slightly Mad Studio head Ian Bell had this to say:
“It’s not looking very likely. We’re running into licensing issues…”
Project CARS currently has two American style stock cars and no oval tracks. American contributors to the project are looking for answers. It now appears that American oval racers will have to wait for Project CARS 2 before oval cars and tracks will be added to the simulation. Bell’s excuse is that they over-delivered in many other areas, but that is little consolation to oval racers who just want to race on ovals.
Bell goes on with some more mumbo jumbo double talk about Bandai Namco games blocking their “season pass” because of potential legal issues, along with more of the “we over-delivered” speech.
It appears that Project CARS did quite the opposite. Bell says the over-delivered. What they actually did was over-promised and under-delivered. That’s bad business. Let’s look at the list of things that were promised yet never delivered.
- Project CARS does not have oval racing as promised.
- Project CARS does not run on the Wii U as promised.
- Project CARS does not have the Verizon Indy Car Series as promised.
- There is no setup management or sharing as promised.
Clearly there are problems with the Project CARS simulation, and it doesn’t look like anything is going to be done about it. Slightly Mad Studios is moving on with the development of Project Cars 2.