Holy shit, they did made another one, well, at least this one is better looking and more polished- the first one was a full-on early access scam, priced at (around) 30 EUR/USD and was a complete mess, it was so bad, that they have actually delisted it from Steam. You can still google it though
https://store.steampowered.com/app/488350/The_Karters/ (archive
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/nNaZ7)
i will buy this game when its out of Early Access.
That would be prudent, because this studio has a shady history and has already changed its name twice - I have heard rumours about applying for government grants for indie studios, filling for bancruptcy, restructuring and reemerging as a completely new studio (with the same people in it) among other things and they have been doing this since 2014.
They started as CmoarVr
https://www.linkedin.com/company/cmoar-vr/about/ (archive
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/fuuQm) and they were creating VR applications: if you will click on the Developer steam page, on Karters 2, you will see two titles: Cmoar VR Cinema, which is something like a VR cinema suite for watching movies from files or other services, and, judging from the comments, wasn't that good and Racket Fury: Table Tennis VR, which is self-explanatory. While the game was more succesfull then the app, it wasn't anything special, even among other, VR table tennis games (as the comments mentions). During that time, they decided to switch their interest and started working on a CRT/Mario kart clone, called the Karters and, per the studio's own dev-blogs, the dev cycle was off to a rocky start and tumultuous proceedings: continous delays, empty promises, two phase closed beta, that did nothing, a launch so disastrous that they have pulled back the game and relaunched it as early-access - MASSIVE shitshow. If you want to read it yourself, the entire devblog is still avaialbe at the news hub, on the Karters steam page (
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/488350?updates=true). During this time, they have rebranded for the first time, to 10Ants Hill and largely abandoned the title. All the old sites for this game were put up for sale and social media left as they were, UNTIL, they decided to rebrand again, this time as Pixel Edge Games, with new website and old social media accounts, updated accordingly (when you click on the facebook page on The Karters steam page, you will be redirected to the Karters 2 page). Sometime during those 7 years, they delisted The Karters and pulled them from steam, prolly not to muddy the waters of their new project. Dunno why they decided to make this into a series though, you would think people would want to know what happened to the first game and why is it not on Steam.
Now, i don't want to shit on them completely - from the steam reviews it seems they've learned a thing or two about optimization and the new game looks much better from the technical standpoint, with added mods support and being Steamdeck ready. Delisting the previous game also paid off, because i don't see any mentions about it in the comments, negative included. But i would still be cautious and watch the development cycle closely - normally, the game costs 10 bucks, so it's not much (and less then The Karters) but i personally don't like studios, who do shit like this and potentially, try to scam people again, preying on nostalgia and member-berries.
And if you were to ask - "wow, that's a special brand of autism, with all this knowledge about a very obscure, indie dev studio and its history, why do you care/how do you know this?"
Well, because those people are both Polish and from Silesia (Katowice to be precise) and there was a time, long ago, when i was interested in the indie dev scene from my own state - which games they were developing, were they succesfull, did i knew anybody working there etc.
