"Let me guess, every arena had a bike shed off to one side?"

I'm guessing that was a shot at Road Redemption, and I do wish the art was better, but having a huge art team to make 50+ miles of track from scratch would cost a lot more than 150k, and leave no money for making the actual game. We used a lot of premade assets from turbosquid and the unity asset store. We used EZRoads to make all the tracks except the rooftop levels. Most of the animations we had to mocap/animate ourselves though because there just are not a lot of solid on motorcycle animations available.

The point is that we actually made a game and it is pretty fun(90% user review score), and we did it with a lot less than 500k. Art does not make a video game. That is why I am saying the clang project was mismanaged. The art they made is beautiful, and looks like it is all custom. They could've easily gotten 90% of that from the asset store and it would be worse, but it would also cost less than $1000. Then they have at least 400k left to make the game. The problem they had to solve was difficult, but with 400k they should've been able to make something awesome.