Hey beta testers! It's been a long hard ride. But that's what makes us strong, right? I want to update you guys on the state of the game and on what's coming up: there’s really big news coming.
I want to start from the upcoming features: literally months has passed since we started working on them and we really can’t wait to finally release them and see your reactions.
Brand New Graphics
The first big news are the new shaders and updated 3D models for the game: we already announced that we’re working on updated graphics for the game and I’m glad to say that we completed the process for all the car blocks / paint elements / accessories in the game, allowing us to see Victory’s user generated cars with updated graphics… and boy, they look awesome!
All the new marketing material we’re releasing (images, trailers, etc.) has been created using the new game engine and shaders/models. You really can appreciate the difference!
Our brand new teaser trailer has been created with the new in-game graphics, check it out: youtube.com/watch?v=1mJ9uQwS2io
What we still miss right now is to update all the racing tracks to the new shaders and this leads me to the next big news:
Procedural Racetracks
Our R&D has been working on this incredible feature for months. We're developing a brand new race creation engine that allows you to create random race tracks based on different parameters.
You can choose for example the environment (Fort Fast, Antartica, Rock Island, etc.), the length, the general difficulty level, etc. and always obtain a different race track. This will open endless opportunities, including the creation of a track editor.
What we’re considering now is to not update the current tracks, but focus on finishing procedural racetracks with updated graphics. What we’ll have at the end of this development sprint will be way more awesome than just the same 15 tracks we have now: an unlimited amount of racetracks, all updated with new graphics!
We still can create “official” tracks to let you set “official” world records, we can change them every month maybe. Or you can just ask the game to create a new track for you and challenge your friends on that track, whenever you want.
After this we can also easily create a track editor that you can use, allowing you to create the track exactly the way you imagine it.
We want Victory to be a racing game with user generated cars and user generated racetracks!
It will take some more time, but we think it will be way better than just updating the graphics of the current 15 tracetracks.
Just imagine our Event system together with procedural racetracks: we’ll have a game that proposes you new events during your gameplay, always with different racetracks, just awesome.
Single Player Career
We want you to enjoy Victory both in multiplayer and in single player mode: We are developing various additional single player modes that will create a career you can enter whenever you want to race against AI drivers. We’ll use procedural racetracks and brand new racing AIs to allow this, creating always different challenges for you.
The State of the Game
A recap on our humble racing game: in the last year we launched Beta 3 and Beta 4 of Victory, introducing great new features and attracting over 150.000 beta testers from all around the world.
We struggled tuning the economy of the game on different occasions, during Beta 3 and Beta 4 we tried all the possible monetisation strategies for a free to play game. They all kind of worked, but we had one big, insurmountable problem: not enough players for a free to play game.
We’re a small independent studio without external financing: we want to stay independent and free to choose what we think is best for our game, but we don’t have the marketing dollars needed for a free to play game to succeed in the market of today.
We started when free to play games were a novelty: to gain new players being free was more than enough. Right now there’s hundreds of different free to play games on the market, all backed by big publishers, spending literally millions of dollars in marketing to acquire new users.
150.000 registered players seems a lot for Victory, but, it turns out, they’re not enough to sustain our little studio. So, what can we do?
Steam to the rescue
Steam is the best possible platform to publish a PC game, everybody knows it. We knew it very well when we entered Greenlight at the end of 2012: we wanted to be on Steam as soon as possible. Greenlight turned out to be a very long process, but we’ve finally been greenlit last december. Hooray!
In the last couple of months we worked hard to bring Victory on Steam as soon as possible and we’re now finally ready to release it. Starting tomorrow (February, 4th), Victory is available on Steam in preview and it will be available to everyone on February the 10th on Steam Early Access.
Steam is for us a one time opportunity to gain new players and finance the rest of Victory’s development.
We’ll hopefully have thousands new players that will help us complete the new features we want to include in Victory. So, finally, we have now the perfect platform, and the right players.
To finance the rest of the development of the game and sustain our little studio we’re going to ask new players to pay a fee to enter the Early Access of Victory.
Our current and beloved beta testers will be able not only to import their old drivers and cars in the new Steam client, but will also receive a promo key that allows them to get it for free.
If you are one of our old beta tester just go to victorythegame.com/steamreedem to redeem yours: With that key you will be able to enter the Steam version of Victory for free.