“People want to play arcade racers again” – How the developer of Wreckreation went from a company-wide redundancy notice to working on a sequel

When we last heard from Fiona Sperry in December, she had just put the entire team at Three Fields Entertainment on notice of redundancy.

The studio had released driving game Wreckreation barely six weeks previously. But in a LinkedIn post, Sperry – who was previously studio head at Burnout maker Criterion – explained that Three Fields would “not see revenue from game sales for the foreseeable future,” and that without “the enthusiasm or financial support from our publisher [THQ Nordic] to continue development, we simply cannot sustain the studio in its current form.”

Eight months later, a lot has changed. “As it turned out, I didn’t make any redundancies,” Sperry tells GamesIndustry.biz.

She went public early about the risk of job losses as a way to raise awareness of the crisis Three Fields found itself in. “I thought, well, no one can help us if they don’t know we need helping,” she says. “It was shit timing because it was before Christmas.”

In response, several people suggested starting a Patreon for Wreckreation, and Sperry noted the game Paralives from Alex Massé had found success through its Patreon programme. “And so we said, ‘Well, do you know what? We’ll give it a go’.” The company launched its Patreon the same month.

“Then in January, the team all came back from Christmas and they were like, ‘Look, we want to carry on.’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s a bit risky, because basically we’ve got about three months’ worth of money. So we can give it a go, but obviously what we’re risking is your redundancy money’.”

But the plan worked. Thanks to Patreon funds donated by more than a thousand backers, Three Fields was able to continue working on Wreckreation, ultimately delivering eighteen updates to fix problems like the cars’ handling (an issue that was picked up on in reviews).

Now, Wreckreation 2 has been announced. But it’s being made by a completely different company – When Tides Turn. So what’s going on?

End of the road

Sperry calls the last year “one of the most commercially challenging periods in my career,” a time when she was worrying whether the company would even be able to make payroll. Wreckreation was released even though the team knew it had problems. “We were aware of all our issues, but we got to a point where we had to publish it,” she says. “We’d had to make decisions that we probably wouldn’t have done otherwise if we didn’t have to get a game out and just get money in the door.”

There were misaligned expectations, too. “I think people were expecting a kind of Burnout-style game, and we made a game that was more about an exploration of freedom and creativity in racing games, which perhaps wasn’t what people wanted.”

Sperry says she “immediately got on Discord” at launch and started talking to players, some of whom were initially cynical. But gradually, Three Fields was able to build, and in some cases rebuild, the relationship with its player base, to the point where Wreckreation 2 is now on the cards.

“If you’d said to me in January we’d be here now in July having announced a sequel, and having actually a lot of support from our players… It’s been quite a journey.”

But the sequel isn’t being made by Three Fields – it’s being made by a new company called When Tides Turn, which has Sperry as its sole director. (Three Fields was originally founded in 2014 by Sperry and Alex Ward, creative director for the Burnout games, who has now taken a step back from the games business.)

Three Fields is still going, Sperry explains. “It’s still the home of those old games,” she says, which include titles like Dangerous Golf and Dangerous Driving, along with Wreckreation. “So if we do any more updates on Wreckreation 1, it would be done under the Three Fields name.”

However, no one works there anymore. “All of the team have been transferred to the new company,” she says. “I remain as a director of both, but they are separate entities.”

Sperry says there are a few reasons for starting a new firm. One is to do something completely on her own. “It’s the first time I’ve started a studio,” she says, adding that the name is intentional. “It’s evocative of how I feel that tides have turned, and looking back over my quite long career and feeling like it’s a new start.”

The sequel dilemma

When Tides Turn is able to make a sequel to Wreckreation because “we essentially sold the [IP] rights from one company to another company,” explains Sperry. As to why, the answer is a little more complex.

“People say, ‘Why are you doing this rather than continue with Wreckreation 1?'” says Sperry. “And it’s like, well, we continued with Wreckreation 1 as long as we could. We did 18 updates. Six of them were content packs, the other 12 were fixes and improvements and things people were asking for. And we tried to do that for as long as we could, but the reality was that we were literally doing it for nothing.

“So in order for us to be able to secure the future for our staff and not end up back in a redundancy position, making a new game was the only path forward.”

Starting a new game was inevitable, it being another Wreckreation was decidedly less so: Video Game Insights estimates that Wreckreation sold around 32,500 units across Steam. PlayStation, and Xbox, which is not the sort of number that suggests strong demand for a sequel.

“We have had that conversation,” says Sperry, “and some people said to me, ‘Well, why don’t you just do a new name?’ And we did debate that. But I think reality is that we have this core audience who are actually very loyal to it, and who still play it, and have put hundreds and hundreds of hours in it. And I suppose we felt a responsibility to them to continue with it, and to turn that around.”

“Everyone says arcade racing’s dead, and actually, I’m not sure that’s entirely true”

She also notes that there’s still huge affection for the old Burnout games, as evidenced by the r/Burnout subreddit having some 10,000 members. Which begs the question, why not just do Burnout again?

“I mean, if you see the trailer, absolutely we’re making an arcade racing game,” replies Sperry. “Everyone keeps saying that arcade racing is dead and big publishers are staying away from it. And that was the start of my thesis, really, for the new company: everyone says arcade racing’s dead, and actually, I’m not sure that’s entirely true. Every time somebody tries to do one, there’s interest.”

She points to Maverick’s upcoming story-based driving game Clutch as a “really interesting” new title in the racing space. But there’s also the fact that Amazon recently pulled out of publishing Clutch, with gaming head Jeff Gattis telling GamesIndustry.biz that “we didn’t see a real fit in the market for that game.”

Sperry acknowledges that for the big publishers, the potential size of the arcade racing market probably isn’t large enough. “If you are only making three games and you’re going to focus on those, then maybe that isn’t what you would do. However, there’s still a big audience. I mean, by the time I left EA, Burnout had sold over 25 million copies. So there’s definitely been a market, and I think from everything I’m hearing and seeing, there’s a love for that, and people would like to be playing those games again.”

She also points out that the overheads for When Tides Turn are tiny compared with what the big publishers might throw at a game. “We’re a team of ten people, and we’re self-publishing,” she says. “We’re not EA, we don’t need it to sell 10 million copies.” As touched on by Mike Bithell recently, it’s a case of product/market fit – committing the appropriate resources for the size of the audience.

Pressures

Sperry is bullish about the prospects of Wreckreation 2, but she acknowledges industry circumstances are not favourable. “Obviously there are pressures, of course there are.”

One of those pressures is finding the cash. Any money made by the first Wreckreation goes to Three Fields rather than When Tides Turn. “It’s minimal anyway, so it’s irrelevant,” says Sperry. “Three Fields actually makes more money from our old games.”

When Tides Turn does, however, have the Patreon fund, which has now been switched over to Wreckreation 2. That alone isn’t enough to fund a new game, but Sperry says she has also been able to secure support from the UK Games Fund.

“Ultimately we’re reliant on the grant and the money that we hope to raise from angel investors,” she says.

It’s no secret that funding is hard to come by in the UK games industry right now, but Sperry thinks the relatively small amounts the company needs are attainable. “I mean, we’re not sitting here saying we need five million pounds. It’s a fairly modest amount, and I feel confident that we can get what we need. I think the challenge is just making sure that we focus on the game, and making sure that the game is as good as it can be.”

“It’s indicative of what you can do when you are transparent with people”

And this time around, Sperry and her team are taking a completely different approach to development. Rather than beavering away in secret before revealing their labours to the world, the team at When Tides Turn is embracing open development on Wreckreation 2, bringing in player feedback from the very start.

Sperry has been partly inspired by the open development approach taken by Evil Raptor, the developers of Far Far West, which launched into Early Access in April, selling over a million units in its first two weeks. “I loved what they were doing,” she says. “It’s indicative of what you can do when you are transparent with people. Although obviously the game’s got to be good, there’s no substitute for that.”

She says the team at When Tides Turn is using Steam’s playtest facility. “We’ll open up a play test, we’ll let people play for a few weeks, then we’ll take all the feedback, close that down, work again, and then update it again. And I think that’s a really exciting way to work, and it keeps you really honest.”

The six months of open development on the Wreckreation updates have been a transformative experience for the team. “Yes, there’s pressure, but actually I’m having a really good time. And I think being that close to customers is brilliant.”

In particular, she says it has revealed the disconnect between developers and players in terms of what’s important. “I had a really long list of issues with Wreckreation 1 when it launched, of things I thought we needed to fix, and pretty much that list went in the bin on day one,” she says. “Once people start playing your game, that’s when you really work out what matters – and they weren’t necessarily the things that we thought would matter.”

Wreckreation 2 has only been in development for “a few months” – but Sperry says that players were testing builds of the game within a month of starting development, and because the difficult technical aspects were already tackled in the first game, the team is now “building on a really solid tech foundation.”

“Once people start playing your game, that’s when you really work out what matters”

In short, she’s hopeful for the future. “We are finally in a position where I think we’ve got the tech that we need, we’ve definitely got the team that we need, we’ve got an audience that’s already engaged – albeit fairly small at the moment. But we have about a thousand people who are definitely passionate about this game.”

That’s enough to start with, she thinks. And beyond that, she has been buoyed by the way the UK industry rallied round her when times were tough.

“I’ve been very encouraged the last six months by the support I’ve received,” she smiles. “I think that’s indicative of a desire within the UK to remember that actually we’re really good at making games here, and actually there’s not many games here that are still British owned. And I’ve seen that in action, people wanting that to still be a thing. It’s been heartening to see.”