The November Postmortems: The Game That Sold The World

What a month November was; it always is in the world of gaming with all the big players making their bid for their new releases to be gifts in the upcoming holiday season. The month that just came and went in particular was a wild one in the world of racing games. So much happened in terms of new releases, future developments, delays and DLCs that every week there was something going on to keep the ball rolling. It felt like everyone was making their move one way or another, and a couple new full releases hoping to make an impact in the right way when the public finally got their hands on them.

Except, it wasn't meant to be. Much was said in the moment for the nightmare launches of both Project Motor Racing and Rennsport, and continue to be said as both games try to build themselves back up to being actual games people would want to play. It's going to take a lot of time for the headings to be righted and in a lot of ways the damage has already been done, especially for the game that actually had some pre-release hype attached to it.

Unlike Rennsport, this was meant to be Project Motor Racing's moment. This was the racing game on the far end of the realistic side of the spectrum that wanted to make an impact beyond just making up the numbers on PC. It had a console release, it had an actual single player campaign with things to do off-track, it had so many rad cars from racing's recent history in a readily accessible environment for the first time in 4K without having to mod them into the game yourself. We had The Stig as one of it's ambassadors and consultants as he got to drive the Lister Storm GT1 around Silverstone. But all of this couldn't prepare for what the game actually was, and the early cracks that were already appearing after it's showing at the Sim Racing Expo in Dortmund, Germany. Perhaps Jimmy Broadbent saying the GT4 class cars, including one that he races in real life, didn't drive right and a member of the development team responding by saying that he "wasn't driving them right," should have been a warning sign. Jimmy would go onto say that PMR was probably a year away from when it should have been released in his review of the game when it first launched.

Then the embargo was lifted, the game was released, and the Steam reviews and general press reviews of the game didn't hold back. Force feedback and camera field of view settings have to be set on a per car basis, optimization and stability that's lacking across a broad spectrum of different PC builds, artificial intelligence that wasn't up to the challenge until more recent updates, online play and car to car netcode leaving a lot to be desired, and it's optimized gamepad controls not even close to where it should be partially because it was coded by ChatGPT. On Xbox, the game will not launch if you still use your original avatar from the Xbox 360 on your Xbox Live account.

We will get back to the guy that admitted that part about programming the gamepad controls with ChatGPT later, but it all comes together by saying that Project Motor Racing is a racing game that looks good on paper and not much more. It has a fantastic car and track list and the cars sounds the part. It actually has a career mode unlike a lot of it's counterparts though it needed more development time for adding depth and further means to dangle the carrot in front of the player to race more. It has all the back of the box features such a racing game should have, but without the proper time and resources put into making it happen as a actual video game. Given time it could probably get there and be at least passable, but the future seems uncertain in the medium to long term with the announcement of redundancies being made at Straight4 Studios. Even if the bulk of the issues do get fixed, how many people would be willing to re-purchase PMR and give it another try?

The game, originally called GTRevival back when it was announced in 2022, was meant to be Straight4 CEO Ian Bell bringing the band back together to make the game to fit the moment that he's wanted to make for a long time. As he said in that initial announcement tweet, it was conceived as a follow-up to GTR2: "Hardcore, balls to the wall, no compromise." A part of that no compromise was not having to deal with publishers that may have gotten in the way of the vision of the games that Ian was at the helm for after GTR2. Both the Need For Speed Shift and Project CARS franchises under his watch weren't all that they were cracked up to be which could be in part due to the constraints put on by publishers Electronic Arts and Bandai Namco respectively on his vision. And to his benefit this time around, GIANTS Software appeared to be pretty hands-off in PMR's development. But the game he built this reputation and legacy on in GTR2 will be having it's 20th anniversary come next year, and the games that have followed that he put his name on, while some financially successful, never lived up to the billing or the burden of expectations laid upon them.

A large chunk of that burden of expectation comes from Ian himself; he knows how to sell a racing game to the captive audience and make people believe that this will match the game that he made his name with. After Project CARS 3 was not anywhere near what the playerbase had hoped, or what Ian wished it could have been, Project Motor Racing was seen as that potential return to form as much as the first two Project CARS titles weren't all that good either. This was the chance to run it back on his terms and a lot of people believed that, so the hype he orchestrated began to build again. But with PMR being what it is, and how he's been fighting back against criticism on X the Everything App, there is this increasing feeling that people fell for the hype in the worst way again without the introspection of what his games have been for the past two decades. It's been a long time since GTR2, was it really worth falling for it again with the guy that has become the Peter Molyneux of the racing game genre in that time? Is this the game that will tell people to stop buying what he's selling? And in regards to GTR2, it couldn't have just been him, right?

Of course, we need to talk about that other main face behind Project Motor Racing. The one that wrote on his blog multiple times and made a now infamous video saying that Sim Racing is full of buggy, unfinished games. The one that did additional nostalgia-bait when it comes to talking about racing games from the 1990s. The guy I already talked about at length more than a month ago with how incredibly problematic and bigoted he is, and had friend of The Powerhouse aleXis Core produce a great video which expanded on why him being involved at such a capacity is a major issue on a broader scale. This was Game Design Director Austin Ogonoski's magnum opus, the game he wanted to make given the chance with his vision and direction at the forefront. Nearly a decade spent in the spotlight within the racing game space was leading to this. And after working under Ian for Project CARS 3 and other projects at Slightly Mad Studios, this was his moment to step up. It's quite the leap from being a part of the Quality Assurance team to helping steer the ship while being a part of the programming team himself, with the help of a large language model.

The spaghetti code written in assistance with ChatGPT unsurprisingly doesn't work well in a video game, much in the same way it's not working for Microsoft in their OS updates to Windows 11. But it also then begs the question with having such a role on the team, what was it like working under Austin Ogonoski as well as under Ian Bell? What was the workflow direction like under their watch? I genuinely believe a lot of the issues with Project Motor Racing come from the top down; with those on the development team working with a relatively unknown game engine put in a rough position to try and make PMR with everything promised while dealing with a CEO that hasn't produced a truly good game in 20 years, and his chud of a protégé that's blown his one shot after he believed be knew better about what a racing game trying to make it big in the mainstream should be and how it should drive.

As one anonymous poster on 4chan put it, with a hint of hyperbole:

james (Austin) i know you're reading this

we're laughing at you
normies are laughing at you
content creators are laughing at you
other devs are laughing at you

you spent years in the fast and furious mines waiting for daddy bell to give you your big break, your chance to build your magnum opus and now, even with all the farm sim money in the world, you make a game that's trading blows with a literal nft scam for worst racing game of the year

gg i hope it was worth it

It is worth noting that, allegedly, one of those affected by those redundancies at Straight4 Studios is Ogonoski himself. The nature of his departure isn't known, but regardless; he reaped what he sowed in the biggest way this genre might have ever seen. You can't make it a recurring discussion point about how older games were better, while claiming new games are buggy and incomplete and then yourself be one of the head honchos of an absolutely abysmal, buggy racing game. Fascist bigot or otherwise, you simply can't do that.

For as much as a lot of us took great joy in watching Austin Ogonoski's golden goose turn out to be a bad egg, there is a cruel second reality going on in light of the redundancies and reduced workforce at Straight4 and the abject failure of Project Motor Racing. There were a lot of good people and names in the space that were getting their chance to make the game they wanted to make too, as much as they had to deal with the burdens of their effective bosses and the reality that without proper employee protections in a organized workforce, that this might happen. Tim Wheatley announced on Bluesky that he was among those affected, though moving to a part-time role rather than fully out of a job a few weeks before the holidays. He deserves a better shake after being in the wrong place at the wrong time on multiple occasions within the racing game space before getting the chance to work full-time on PMR while being owner and historian at his brilliant website Race Sim Central. He, and others, deserve much better; and the infinite positive possibilities of the future can always make that a reality.

A future reality where maybe, the men who sold the world are finally left in the past.