Stampede: Racing Royale is an automotive take on the battle royale genre

gamedeveloper.com:

Sumo Digital development director Paul Hollywood worked on many racing games during his career. When he was at Evolution Studios and Sony, he created the first two games in the MotorStorm series: 2006’s MotorStorm and 2008’s MotorStorm: Pacific Rift.

Now he’s at Sumo Leamington and working on a new game called Stampede: Racing Royal, published by Secret Mode. The game was revealed at the PC Gaming Show 2023 and is billed as Mario Kart meets battle royale. With the widespread appeal of Nintendo’s cart racer with the fun competitiveness of battle royale games like Fall Guys, it’s astonishing that such a combination of ideas hasn’t been done yet, right?

Hollywood sat down with Game Developer to talk about Stampede: Racing Royal and its mechanics.

Sumo Digital was looking for a void in the market, and the cross between a cart game and a battle royale one was just ironically obvious that Holly was surprised that there wasn’t a game like it yet.

“These were the right key drivers for bringing something new to the market. We're not defining a new genre. We’re defining a new sub-genre and melding these two different game mechanics,” he explains. “As that progresses over the lifecycle of the game, it's about bringing in the community and understanding what's working.”

Hollywood emphasized the fun factor of Stampede: Racing Royale, noting that some studios go through the entire development journey trying to find the interesting hook or the compelling narrative in their games. However, with Stampede Racing Royale, the mechanic is already there.

In fact, the team made sure not to add too much to the game as that would detract from the core gameplay. Each match has three rounds and starts with 60 players. After every round, the bottom 20