Slightly Mad Studios Says Wii U Project Cars Was “Always A Maybe”

Yesterday we reported Project Cars developer Slightly Mad Studios was having trouble getting the Wii U version of Project Cars to run properly. With all its bells and whistles, the game was running at a sluggish 23 frames per second, and could not top 720p in resolution.

Today studio head Ian Bell spoke with Nintendo Life and elaborated on his forum post that leaked this unfortunate info. Since Project Cars began life as a Kickstarter project, shouldn’t the studio be on the hook to produce a Wii U port eventually? Not so, he said, and pointed out the actual specifics of the agreement:

“Project CARS/Weapons of Mass Development opened funding initially as a Free to Play PC only Racing game. This is when the bulk of the funding arrived. Funding was closed late 2013.

By vote of the members, it changed to a boxed product PC/Xbox 360/PS3 and ‘maybe Wii U’ game. It was always ‘maybe’ as we had no knowledge of the system.

It was again changed, by vote of the members, to a PC/Xbox One/PS4 next gen game with still ‘maybe Wii U’ and Steam OS. The funding, as I said above, was closed long before this.

We still haven’t given up on Wii U 100% but if we can’t make it work we will move to the next Nintendo machine.”

“No knowledge of the system” sounds like a pretty big flaw in their strategy. Despite all this, Slightly Mad Studios isn’t ready to give up on Wii U Project Cars. “We still haven’t given up on Wii U 100 percent,” said Bell, “but if we can’t make it work, we will move to the next Nintendo machine.” This may also be misguided. The NX will not even be mentioned again by Nintendo until next year, and if the past console rollout pattern holds, dev kits probably won’t be handed out until much later.