The Latest On Table Top Racing Coming To PS4

We recently learned that Table Top Racing: World Tour would be making its way onto the Playstation 4. It is the follow up to Table Top Racing which released on PlayStation Vita and Android earlier this year and iOS last year.

Developers, Playrise recently conducted an interview with Redbull.com, I’ve picked out the juicy bits below.

Q. 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.”

Q. 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.”

Q. 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.”

Q. 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.”

Q. 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.”

Table Top Racing: World Tour is due for release on Playstation 4 late next year, ro read the full interview between Playrise and Redbull.com click here.