Hey, everyone.
Today I have some unpleasant news to share with you. LCQ Studios and Turborilla have mutually agreed to part ways and cease development on ‘Mad Skills Motocross: Chasing the Dream’. This seemingly abrupt announcement is because we could not secure the necessary funding required to get this thing off the ground full-time. We just announced our partnership seven months ago, however, we have been working together on this for the past two years – since right after the ‘Motocross: Chasing the Dream’ demo released in August of 2022.
I won’t get too deep into the details, but in March of 2023 we went and pitched the game at GDC in San Francisco and caught the interest of a couple of publishers. By the end of summer, we thought we had a deal locked in with one publisher but they pulled out at the last second which was a huge blow as we had worked so damn hard. After that, we had a couple of leads going into the spring and summer of 2024 but everything just fizzled out.
I have a couple of suspicions about why this happened. The main one is the state of the video game industry right now. As of June 2024, there were already 10,500 game industry layoffs totaling more than all of 2023, and has only kept growing. Companies overhired during the pandemic and the money dried up. Now companies, publishers, and investors are being super cautious about what games they sign and I don’t think publishers saw enough of the potential in “Chasing the Dream” like we did.
So what happens now? “Chasing the Dream” is dead and we will not try to revive it – mainly because Valve will not let us re-publish the old demo on Steam. However, we are going to keep working on our core physics, multiplayer, and modding systems that we have been developing for the last two and a half years to be used in a new motocross title that we will announce when we are ready. Our scope for the new title will be changing and we will focus solely on the three things mentioned just now – physics, multiplayer, and modding. We would like to create a lightweight, fun game for everyone to enjoy and leave room for adding other features like a potential story mode in the future if we want to. We are going to honor our previous statement where everyone who bought the original ‘Motocross: Chasing the Dream’ demo will receive the new game for free when it is available.
This whole thing seems pretty on-brand for us – We try something new and fail pretty hard which instills a lot of doubt in people on the outside watching our every move. But we’re going to keep pushing to make our dreams a reality. “Chasing the Dream” is gone forever, but the essence still lives on and I sincerely hope everyone sticks around to see how it turns out. I started this journey 9 years ago not knowing where to begin and I have since clocked hundreds of 80-hour weeks between my day job and coming home to work on my dirtbike game – the same with Damien and Roger. This time we’re getting out of the LCQ and into the Main Event… after all, our journey thus far has resembled exactly the principles LCQ Studios was founded on.
Thanks for your support over the years, and stay tuned for what’s next.
