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I'm not saying they're greedy, quite the opposite, paid costs as much as they could out of their pockets because this series is their long-time love-child. But you can't eat love.
They far overspent KS-budget and it took a lot of extra funds to fix most major problems. Some more knowing and insightful people here can shed more light on the situation, try looking at other threads, like: https://steamcommunity.com/app/505170/discussions/0/1488861734097467879/
so the macfags and android/nix blokes never got a port? Thats really kinda shi-t considering thats where the originals really hit it big as the first sort of "real" popular linux games back in the day.
Money, time, resources, tools, size of the company, all of those contributed to "what went wrong", but money is probably the biggest problem as you can pretty much throw money at the rest of the issues to solve them.
The original kickstarter pitch was for a much smaller game with much more limited scope and less technical complexity. The money they brought in through the kickstarter realistically wasn't even enough to cover that original scope and ended up being a small fraction of the amount they ended up spending on the game.
Making games is extremely expensive, especially games of the scope of Carmageddon. They threw all the money they could to develop the game, to improve the engine and get it to where they wanted it to be, but that wasn't enough to make it a success and it didn't sell anywhere near enough to cover what they spent on it. Regardless of a developer's passion or desire, if a game is not close to breaking even then a developer simply can not keep spending money on it or keep it as their main focus if they want to stay in business.
If they had twice the budget they could have had more hands on deck, spread the work more evenly between fixing bugs, optimizations, etc. and implementing all the desired features, and had a decent marketing budget to sell more copies.
A big financial sink for the project was the fact they were using their in-house engine which needed major rewrites to do what they needed and to use modern tech. It was fine for Magic The Gathering but for a detailed 3D car combat game it wasn't up to snuff by modern standards. They ended up having to rewrite core parts of the engine while the game was being developed, which held things up significantly and probably meant components were rushed to a usable state so gameplay and content could be worked on, so they were not done in the ideal way, so they had to keep going back to them and improving them while they were already in use which made things even more difficult and time consuming. If they had the budget, and thus the time and manpower, to get the engine up to scratch from the get go then the whole development process would have been much smoother and no doubt resulted in a better game.
If they had a bigger budget they could have also used a 3rd party engine such as Unreal Engine 3. In hindsight, if they had waited a couple of years to start production then they could have easily used Unity 5 or Unreal Engine 4 and hooked their propitiatory vehicle physics and damage systems up to them, however at the time Unity 4 wasn't up to the job and full-source UE3 was far too expensive to license (about 2x what the Kickstarter brought in, or more) while UDK was too restrictive. At the time using their own engine was the best option available to them, but in retrospect it wasn't a great idea and was a significant factor in it turning out how it did.
All in all, as Ryuu said, the game was a labour of love for Stainless, they did all they could to make it everything they wanted it to be and they unfortunately fell short of the mark. There's no faulting their desire or commitment here, they continued to work on it and tried to appease the fans long after most companies would have walked away. Their desire to keep fans happy was to their detriment as well, as they gave away copies of the original games on steam and GoG to all the backers where that would have brought them in more money, they gave multiple keys away to each backer which again cut their sales, and they gave away Max Damage to all owners of Reincarnation because they felt it wasn't right to make their fans pay twice for what was really the "finished" version of Reincarnation. If anything they were too passionate about the game, made too many promises based on that passion (for example the Mac and Linux ports) and let the passion get in the way of making the hard calls to trim back scope and reign in their plans.
Another big issue they constantly faced was the expectations of their fans, both in terms of the quality of the game and the time frame involved. A large portion of their customers were expecting a cutting edge, breakthrough triple-A game like their originals were back when the top games were made by a half dozen people in six months. From the get-go people were comparing it to the likes of GTA5 which burn through Stainless' budget in a week, expecting it to be competitive when placed side by side with them. There's no managing expectations when people are in that mindset and a small developer on a shoestring budget has no way of living up to it but Stainless tried, which I guess was also part of the problem as they were reaching beyond the capacity of a studio their size with such a small budget. Not living up to expectations causes negative reviews and negative word-of-mouth, which impacts sales, which impacts cash flow, which impacts their ability to keep working on the game for as long as they wanted to.
Out of interest, you say you liked Reincarnation, but why are you calling Max Damage "lazy"? It is the same game as Reincarnation. I don't mean that in a "they made a follow up but it's really the same game, they're not even trying" but it is literally an update to the same game developed contiguously, it was just released under a new name due to publishing agreements for the console versions. If it were a lazy follow up they would have kept Reincarnation available to buy and not given everyone free copies of Max Damage for owning Reincarnation. On the contrary, Max Damage had a tremendous amount of work done on it, with major rendering improvements, enhanced damage with splitting and twisting, significant multithreading improvements and much more. It was the culmination of everything the had been working on throughout Reincarnation's development.
That said i still replay both games, in fact ill do it right now dare i say i really like them
Lets be honest though the problem wasnt the engine at its core it was the way the game was made. I guess it was before the days of free game SDKs and engines so as you said it was all they had but seriously it could have gone so much better, imagine if they had taken the time to actually do a proper roadmap for the game? Hell it could have come out last year totally finished and it probably wouldnt have died
In other news at least they are still alive even if their last post was a year ago
http://www.stainlessgames.com/news
Yeah, we just don't want them to go bankrupt and get purchased by some evil Electronic Arts, too many good companies and franchises died in that hell-hole.
But at least Stainless got back their IP.
It's like a massive house of cards built of many layers where you need to reach in, pull out some cards from the middle and replace them with new, more sturdy cards to support adding extra layers on top. You might only need to replace a few cards, but those cards are holding up a lot more cards and even more cards are in the way of getting to them. What starts off looking like a very simple thing ends up needing to rip huge chunks out to accommodate that small change. Now imagine doing that while other people are still building on the top of it. You have to get them to wait on you and they might have to redo the bits they had been working on because your change has made their work unstable. By the time you know the extent of what needs to be done you're already committed to that course of action and long passed the point where you can go back and use that knowledge to make new, better plans to avoid the problems. Your highly detailed plans are no longer valid and you have to figure things out as you go.
Frankly if they had delayed it to be released when it was 100% finished then it would have been in an even worse state because they wouldn't have had any revenue coming in the last years since Reincarnation hit Early Access, it would have just been hemorrhaging cash. Every year in development is over a million quid down the drain on staff wages alone, that is no exaggeration.
Development of the game could certainly have gone better. They could have chosen to not use Virtual Textures and limited their art style to accommodate that. They could have gone for a more stylised look which would have meant less need for cutting edge rendering systems. They could have stuck to the original much smaller scope with less vehicles and less levels. They could have aimed for a straight remake of C1 or C2. They could have decided to have less detail in the cars, the damage and the amount of physics objects. They could have decided against adding online multiplayer. Any of those would have significantly reduced the pressure on the game's development, but all of them would have made fans all the more disappointed that it didn't live up to their expectations of a cutting edge game.
It's easy to look back at it now and say "they made the wrong decision, they could have done better if they did this instead of that". Hindsight is 20/20, as they say. Even the seemingly simplest of games can be complex to make and there's no clear cut "best way of doing it" so you just make plans and decisions based on your current knowledge. In game development that knowledge is often inadequate as you're almost always trying to do things which you haven't done before to one degree or another and learning on the job. You don't know what you don't know, so you can't plan around it and that can make what seems like a rock solid plan end up being a bodged up mess held together by duct tape by the end of it. All games are held together by that metaphorical duct tape, some are just better at hiding it.
At the end of the day they did the best with the situation they were in and no one is more disappointed with it not being a success than those who poured their souls into making it.
Loved the originals and the whole culture surrounding it. Please dont give up on carmageddon!
TBH i think it was just marketing. For me, I've got a carma game exactly like the old ones with really shiny graphics.
Other than multiplayer, the damn game is fine.
Reincarnation is the better game in my opinion.
l have read all of these posts and wonder just what new issue has arisen since this game is almost 20 months old.
Nope, I'm just a long term fan and a modder. I've made a load of tools for modding the game, ported C1's cars and levels to it and such but that's all been in my free time as a hobby, I have no professional association with Stainless.
However I have talked to guys at Stainless quite a lot over the last half dozen years, as have a lot of long term fans in the community. They're all a great bunch of people and their passion was plainly visible, always excited about working on the game and heartbroken when it didn't live up to people's expectations or reach the level of success it deserved. Stainless are still alive and working but Carma not selling as well as they needed it to combined with WotC making their own studio to make Magic games instead of contracting Stainless has no doubt hit them really hard.
Everyone who worked on C:R/MD who is still at Stainless would love to keep working on it, fixing the remaining issues and adding new stuff, Nobby especially always talked about supporting it for years after release. The reality is the company's survival comes first, they won't ever be able to make more Carma if they go bust, so they have minimal time to support C:MD right now. They're still poking at it when they can, last time I talked to Si he was determined to get a fix sorted for the AMD Vega/Ryzen issue among other nagging bits, but it seems to be going very slowly as they are busy trying to earn an income. Looking to the future, Stainless recently had a job posting for a game designer with knowledge of cars, racing and Unreal Engine 4, and Batwick recently posted photos on facebook of him capturing audio from the V8 in his truck so there's obviously a modern game about cars of some sort being worked on to some degree.
I also agree with Patrick Swayze and RadioactiveHEuroLInvertedexclamationXXRadioactive. The game, despite the problems it faced through development, turned out just fine in the end. Yes, it's a little rough around the edges and there's issues needing to be sorted but that doesn't stop the game being good. If it were first released in the state it is today then I'm sure it would have got a lot more success, unfortunately the mentioned development issues and limited budget meant it was originally released when it still had a lot of problems. Once a game gets a bad rep for being ♥♥♥♥ and broken and running like crap on top end machines (as many people exaggerated in their reviews) it's extremely hard to come back from that, especially when it seems more people are spreading those complaints (even long after they have been fixed) than there are people playing the game.
I'd also say re-releasing the game as "F2P" is not really a viable solution. F2P is a business model and C:MD doesn't have anything in it which can be monetized like that. It would require significant redevelopment and substantial new content to be a viable F2P game, which would cost a lot of money which could be better spent making a new, potentially more successful game. Without that redevelopment, it would just be free, not F2P. Given how it's regularly on sale for the price of a cup of coffee anyway I don't think it being free would help it gain much more traction and that "traction" won't help much if there's no way to turn it into revenue.
offtopic: Yeah, i hate show-off nicknames, and i especially enjoy when various games display them incorrectly or even crash due to trying use nickname as filename - they deserve that. Used similar nicknames myself, when i was around 16, lol.
But since Steam does not use nicknames for uniqueness or identification - they don't care.