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Table Top Racing is back with a vengeance
From consoles to mobile and back again, how Playrise are getting back to what they do best.
Table Top Racing is back with a vengeance
© Playrise Digital
Sony lost a lot of talent when it shuttered its Liverpool games studio in England two years ago, scattering the talent behind the Wipeout series of superfast racing games. Now though, it's found some of them again. A new partnership means that Playrise, formed by Sony developer Nick Burcombe and the company behind hit mobile game Table Top Racing, are bringing a sequel, Table Top Racing: World Tour, to PS4 first. There's more to this story than meets the eye, though. Playrise initially set out to break away from the more typical console business with the mobile-only Table Top Racing, but soon found themselves lured back into the traditional model with a belated release on Sony's PS Vita. We caught up with the Playrise CEO to find out more about World Tour, as well as why his team of five is never going to make another free-to-play game.
It's been a couple of years since you left Sony and struck out on your own with Playrise. How did the original mobile Table Top Racing release fare?
So, Table Top Racing on iOS went out in January 2013 and snagged Editor's Choice on iPhone. It did very, very well and put us in good stead - for a while anyway. About seven months through we decided we were going to set it free, and change the monetization process. We've done a few updates since then, added a few cars, and they've always gone down pretty well.
But now you're switching back from free to play to the more traditional console model. Why?
I think overall because we didn't really understand free-to-play before we went into it. We made a little bit of a mistake, turning a paid app into a free one. We should have just released a free one in hindsight. Turning it free was a bad idea. It was still a learning exercise, but what was painfully clear to us, with us having developed what I would consider a gamer's game, is that if you're going to go into free-to-play then you've got to be really serious about chasing down monetisation and refining it through analytics. It started to change the shape of the company from what we originally intended. We were looking through all this data and thinking 'Well, we're not making games here, this is not what we're good at or what we wanted to do when we got into this'.
So we took a decision fairly recently that we will no longer deal with the free-to-play market. It's just not what we're meant to do. You need an army full of analysts looking at data and squeezing the next two cents out of a player. We want to make games that show off what we're capable of and are fun to play ourselves. So we drew a line in the sand.
But why the move back to console as well? How did the Sony partnership come about?
The real focus is to move on to Table Top Racing: World Tour, starting with PS4, premium product, digital download, and make the game that we really wanted to make. You're quite obviously curtailed on mobile with the technology and you have to make compromises, especially when you're looking at an eco system like Android, where it's so heavily fragmented. Something like 5800 different devices can play our game. I can't tell you which devices play it best!
We put the concept for World Tour together and took it to Sony, and they loved it. They could see we were aiming high, and they snapped it up on a short term exclusive, but obviously we'll be free to take it to other platforms after the PS4 launch. Starting on PS4 is a good thing for us – it makes us aim high, take stuff out rather than keep adding stuff. When we eventually take it back to mobile it'll have some stuff changed no doubt, but we'll just stick to the premium market and what we're best at.
Table Top Racing: World Tour
© Playrise Digital
In a way you've gone full circle.
Yeah, and I think that's because the attitudes have changed somewhat. When we first started out, paid apps on the App Store were doing fine. By the time we'd launched on iOS they were starting to struggle – the market was swinging towards free-to-play quite heavily. By the time we reached Android it was free all the way now, and the market is not really what we went in for. Equally the attitude of Sony and Xbox has changed somewhat. I think since a lot of the big studios around here closed down, and lots of little indie developers have sprung up, the doors are open now.
What's different in World Tour?
One of the things that we've always wanted to do with Table Top Racing is make it much more dynamic. The environments on mobile have to be static, we can't do too many objects in physics. So we said, 'Let’s take these barriers away, and what do we want it to be?' And that's a much more dynamic environment.
Table Top Racing clearly takes a few cues from Micro Machines. What are the plans for multiplayer this time round? Will there be splitscreen? There's still no multiplayer in the Android version of the original game.
The priority is to get eight player online working. We've just done a test of that last week, and it's working fine. It's great fun and we haven't even put weapons in there, which is always a good sign so early in the project. But the ambition for the team is to bring back splitscreen player support. Now whether it's there for launch or not, we're not completely sure. We love the idea of mates getting together on a couch with a pizza and having a laugh because that's how people used to play, that was social gaming.
Table Top Racing: World Tour
© Playrise Digital
How many cars and tracks can we expect this time around?
There's probably going to be six launch tracks, of which there will be three extended routes on them. It's fairly open, and you can improvise. Each track is probably going to take a month and a half to two months to make, and each car maybe three to four weeks.
What platforms are you targeting after PS4?
Our current line is that we're platform agnostic: we don't mind. There's a path from a development point of view which is easiest to go through, and we'll probably follow that path. PS4 will be launch, then it's a toss up really whether PC or Xbox One comes next. We don't know about Wii U at the moment, and we haven't had a conversation with Nintendo or approached them in anyway yet. They've got Mario Kart, so is it really in their interest to do this, I'm not entirely sure. Hopefully the mobile market has shifted again, who knows, but the way we're structuring Table Top Racing is to make it extendible. We expect to add new tracks, new cars and new gameplay for a long time to come. The reason it's called World Tour is the global kind of race tracks and table tops. That’s useful for DLC packs on consoles.
By a canny coincidence, Codemasters, the studio behind the original Micro Machines games, has released a spiritual sequel today, Toybox Turbos. Would you consider it a rival?
I think they're taking it from a different point of view really, literally a different point of view. We're still going to stick to our camera-behind-the-car. Their view is very much an overhead camera, a bit like Micro Machines. One of the things I didn't like about Micro Machines was falling off the back of the screen and then resetting, that kind of catch up mechanic. If you were really good at it, it didn't matter, if someone was really rubbish at it, it did. They're making a different type of game.
From an artistic point of view, we're trying to create something very much akin to racing real toy cars around real table top circuits. That's a conscious decision to make, what they've got is quite cartoony. I think we're making different types of games really, but they're in the same market as us so we'll see them on the battlefields. I think we’ll compete with them quite favourably.
Table Top Racing: World Tour is due for release on PS4 late next year.
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