Kickstarter for Rollcage successor Grip abandoned

Developer Caged Element have abandoned their attempt to Kickstart a successor to 1999 PlayStation racer Rollcage.

Grip had been seeking CAD $657k ($500k/320k) but the studio decided to call it a day after raising just CAD $154k.

We apologise for the lack of updates on our Kickstarter page; it’s hard to post updates to a campaign, knowing it’s unlikely to succeed,” the company said. Yes, we realised a while ago (as did many of you) that things were not looking positive for reaching our funding goal.

That said, we continued to push. We released a new action-packed trailer. We did interviews. We tweeted, emailed and posted everywhere we could. Sadly, we just did not receive the exposure we needed to maintain the momentum after you all gave the campaign such a fantastic start.”

As is often the way with such things, however, Caged Element says it has no plans to abandon development of the game. Instead, it has kicked off its own independent fundraising drive and announced plans to release on Steam Early access by the end of November.

Are we disappointed in the performance of the Kickstarter? Sure,” it conceded. Is an unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign going to stop us from making this game for you? Hell no.

The good news is, we have a great plan for moving forward, and we’re very excited with the direction we’re about to take. We’re hoping you’ll continue to support us in our journey together.

Early access will allow us to truly focus on development, while giving the players the power to change the shape of the game as it’s being made. Community feedback will be essential in GRIP’s continued development, and we like it that way. This is how we envisioned this project to play out from its inception, which is why we’re so excited about this new plan.”