Vroooom

Project C.A.R.S. trailer - Wet is Beautiful from JonZ on Vimeo.

The project is now about 94% funded and we have approximately 1 year left in development. I sent another 32k last week, bringing my total investment to just over $100,000. I'm only the 2nd biggest investor. There's a British ex-pat living in Hong Kong that is in for $325,000. If the game ships a million units, which should be easy, he'll make about 1.2 million dollars.

We've done some additional analysis on the distribution and we have a cost of about 54%, so the net revenue is less than half of the cost of each unit sold. That's.. kinda sucky.. but it beats the hell out of the margins with a big publisher like EA. EA doesn't make small games anymore because their budgets are 50 mil or more. We're making the game for 3.75 mil.

We've had a couple of nice licenses come in also.. one from Ruf, which makes highly tuned Porsches, and the other is not supposed to be announced publicly yet since the deal isn't inked yet.. but it's German, and we used to have one of their cars in our garage. The amazing thing is that this German company approached SMS about getting their cars in the game. That's a big deal.

I doubt we'll be able to get Ferrari or Lamborghini though. Like Porsche, I think their licensing deals are exclusive to EA. The game itself is coming along very well. I'm just blown away by how good it looks. That'll help when it comes to selling it.. plus, the novelty of it being funded by the fans is going to generate a massive amount of press. Yes, some smaller indie games have been fan funded, but nothing on this scale has been done before. It's pretty exciting.