There have been job losses, a restructuring and a tricky 12 months, but according to its creators, Project Motor Racing is sticking around for the long term.
Just over a week before the fourth, and final, downloadable content pack for the Year 1 Season Pass was unveiled, the timing felt strange. There’s never a good moment, and it raised further questions about the title’s viability.
However, at the SimRacing Expo Frankfurt, Aristotelis Vasilakos, Chief Creative Officer, and Ryan Swaby, Development Operations Manager, visited to face assembled media.
“As you know, we unfortunately had to let go of some people,” said Vasilakos, who also goes by ‘Aris’, to Traxion at the event.
“We now have a small team. It’s unfortunate for all the people that left.
“[The remaining people] are a very strong core team. We have a good foundation, and that foundation now is getting optimised to the extreme so that we can go into the very long term.”
Break even
Every cloud has a silver lining, apparently, and in the case of Project Motor Racing, the reduced overheads combined with a recent uptick in sales make it self-sufficient, according to the CCO:
“This small team permits us to not have any fears anymore [about] what’s going to happen in the future.
“Project Motor Racing [game] sales are now self-sustaining; we have reached that level. We’re just going and going, making this game as great as possible.
“Sales are really going up the hill right now. We are duplicating every time.”
“We’ve tripled ourselves in the last month, I think, on a weekly basis,” Swaby keenly clarifies.
“That all shows that the trajectory is good,” continues Vasilakos.
“You know, I’m not telling you that it’s ‘Hey, party time’, but this is the direction.”
Plans for 2027/2028
Touting that is one thing; delivering on player feedback is quite another. There’s still an inordinate amount of work to be done on single-player AI abilities, online stability and the driving experience.
Despite the compact team, the message is clear: Project Motor Racing is here to stay.
When asked about support in 2027, the convivial sim racing veteran’s response is emphatic:
“Oh, 100 per cent, we’re [already] talking about what we’re gonna do in 2028!”
“With the small team that we now have, it’s allowed us to be really focused,” explains Swaby to Traxion.
“We can all work autonomously and do what we think is best for the project. As passionate people who all really want this game to succeed, it’s just driven us more to actually do what we think can benefit [the game].”
“You know when you work in big teams, and you have a meeting every day for each department?” queries Vasilakos.
“So my week used to [start with] meetings across three departments. Then, the next day, another three meetings. Now we have one meeting on Monday for all the team.”
So, what’s next?
It could be (rightly) argued that the sim title should have never been released in the state it did. But the quantity of post-release updates cannot be critiqued so easily.
Next month will see the launch of another paid downloadable content set, the World Endurance Pack, but also further refinements and a new Hot Laps feature.
Here, a time attack system integrates ghosts of people quicker than you across bronze, silver, gold and ‘alien’ tiers. Set a faster time, the ghost automatically updates to the next driver ahead of you through dynamic leaderboards.
Project Motor Racing Hot Laps mode, work-in-progress. Image: Traxion
Alongside that, force feedback undergoes further tweaks, with “some extra sliders for people that want to tweak,” according to Aris and the next DLC “also brings new features on the physics engine because the LMP1 cars have an energy per lap that gets reset [each tour].”
The Simplified Physics AI Model (see what it did there?) will allow for 32-car grids for all three platforms. At least initially, anyway.
“32 [cars] is currently working,” says Swaby.
“We even had some fun and tried 100 on PC and 50+ on console, but we’re not going to be doing that straight away because we want to leave some headroom.
“The AI on consoles, they [currently] go through every five-to-six cores to calculate, but now [in a future update] it takes only three cores,” highlights Vasilakos.
“The amount of time on those three cores is like eight times less than before.”
PMR Connect
There’s also a partnership with SimGrid to introduce a multiplayer feature called PMR Connect.
The plan is to allow communities to register online and schedule events. Each driver has a unique code, which can be tied to a community. Once registered, events matching that group appear in the personalised in-game schedule. Ahead of a race, a notification will be sent with a one-click join process.
When quizzed about the general online performance and stability of PMR, Aris states that development “is still ongoing” with “people working on that.”
Introducing AI-controlled vehicles into multiplayer races, helping bulk out grid numbers, is also being created. The career mode won’t be reinvigorated this year, but will be once more fundamental elements are updated, according to Swaby:
“We have nothing set in stone in the immediate future [for career], but 100 per cent we do want to work on that.
“Once we get these baseline features like improved AI, rolling starts and hot laps, then we can focus.”
“When you have the AI that runs bigger grids, imagine what you can do with the career mode?” posits Aris.
No Year 2 Season Pass
When the aforementioned World Endurance Pack arrives on 10th November, it will bring with it 11 cars and Fuji Speedway (plus the 1966 historic layout).
It will also mark not just the end of the Year 1 Season Pass DLC, but the very notion of a ‘Season Pass’ for the game. There will be no Year 2 Season Pass.
Mercifully, that doesn’t mean the end of content releases.
“The benefit we have now is we’re not forced to do something we agreed to two or even three years ago,” says Swaby.
“We can actually have proper conversations, proper licensing with the right people and actually do what we really want to do.
“We’re currently thinking about some possible real-world championships, and we can actually have an extended conversation and take time to see if it’s actually viable.
“I’m actually happy we’re not forced to do a season two. We can actually take our time, release DLC when we want.”
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