It depends how you look at it. You never have to buy a new game with R3E. Just look at Forza, Projec CARS, Codemasters F1,.... The all bring new games every x years. Project CARS started in 2015 and 3 years later they have already 2 games and if you bought them new with the season pass, you already payed close to 200 € and it looks like the development of PC2 is already over.
I've spent less that £100 or euro on raceroom content, but I can play it whenever I want. Compared to other hobbies it's cheap, I could spend that in a heartbeat on bike parts and clothing which would wear out and need replacing, it's all relative but I think it's good value.
True, but then I used to have a PS3 back a few years ago and games for that were £40 each, more if you add dlc in for dirt series games. All the multiplayer servers for those are gone now. RR still has loads of life in it, if the platform migrates to a different engine there could be another 10 years if people support it still.
You can get Assetto corsa ultimate for 40€ and Raceroom premium for 64€ regulary. Sounds normal game prices to me.
I recall havign played games in a time when they costed 29 or 39 - D-Marks. Playstation4 games today cost lets say 59 to 69 Euros, plus expenses for memberships or DLCs. The factor is 3-4. To some degree these raises are okay since we get much more workhours's results, and better quality (at lest hopefully). But obviously coin-milking also is name of the game, now that computergaming has become an expression of contemporary culture and "Zeitgeist", like movies. ( What really makes me angry only is if somebody tells me, an economic "Austrian", that prices should be raised and inflation of 2% should be secured for "it benefits the economy". That is utmost irresponsible nonsense and only shows that this somebody has understood neither the concept of money nor what the term "inflation" really means. ) Still: if gaming-capable computer equipment is becoming more and more wide-spread, common understanding of the market would expect that prices drop due to growing mass production. Instead the past years showed something like the opposite. That nVidia boards were abused for cryptocurrency mining, of course did not help this. The stocks of many major tech names are in a dive since quite some time by now. The fiv ebig ones, Apple, Alpha/Google, Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, all duck for cover. Maybe they have been at their peak already. That hardware manufacturers like Intel try to dose techncial progress in order to suck as many profit as possible from existing tech standards, doe snot make it better. I remind of the Intel controversy from one year ago. Regarding Raceroom specifically, I thought for long time that just updating the graphics and performance would be sufficient to secure its long term surivival. But i mjst admit that since some months I lean to a thinking of that that alone maybe will not be enough, while more and more players seem to become critical of just finacing the product by ever more cars beign coded. I think the technical fundament of the driving - physics - must be ut onto a new fundament sooner orm later as well. Alex' retuning within the framework of the existing engine, wins time, and is welcomed, yes. I often said that I like it. But competition does not sleep. And for a title that focusses so strongly on online leaderboards and esports, the MP server structure of Raceroom still is surprisingly weak and vulnerable - with this focus of theirs I think it should be literally fail-safe. . I occassionaly try it, just to see whether there are visible improvements. But i cant see them, it remains to be a vulnerable experience with stutterings occasionally. Well, I am not interested in MP anyway, i just sometimes check in to see how it is going. Business like this can be done in two ways: either you suport your "sold-as" product for some time, then end development and start new from scratch. Or you constantly dd chnages to it by financing it with kind of a subscription model (iR) or microtransactions (RR). But without a substantial revolution in the core of RR, not just the cosmetics, maybe the model of RR may prove to lead into a dead end sooner than one year ago I would have thought. Becasue maybe the existing business model is not rich enough to support such a drastic step, with this step nevertheless beign necessary. However, i am certain they have thought about all this already themselves. And different to me, they know their financial numbers. It would be interesting to learn about their assessment of the U4E so far, and how it is going in GTR3. They must observe that with eagle's eyes.
I wonder what would be better. Switching to the UE4 engine or updating the current one to directx12? With unreal a lot of stuff is already there. No need to develop graphic fx but it seems to eat performance at breakfast. ACC will be the first sim using unreal.all other games using unreal are 3rd person shooter so far i know.well wait for the outcome. Not to forget that if u use unreal you have to pay the monthly fee wich is about 5% of sales if i remember correctly. Updating the current engine to directx12 might be more work at first but at the end it could be a better solution for simracing games than unreal. I’m not a programmer. I should ask my son for this.he is soon informatiker master of science .
I really hope they go with the DX12 route. Can't stand the UE4 pop-in, just takes all the immersion off for me.
Comparing prizes ? I bought F1 2010 for PS3 in 2010 for 64€, 8 years later in same store F1 2018 for PS4 costs 69€ (without discount).
120 for GP2 here probably most expensive game I ever bought. Any top game was 80+ DM imo, so the 39 DM Skybird mentions I only recall for "older games" (EA classics). Working for that green hardware company I also disagree with the "dosed" technical progress, yes Intel may have held back the number of cores (thx AMD they were forced to react) but the actual development for single core perf, fabrication process etc. is all pretty much at the edge atm. Compared to the old days chips are no longer cheaper to produce, but transistor costs are rising. The level of complexity are pretty insane on the high-end. There is more or less only one company left doing the latest and greatest in chip production. Every progress made these days, is really really hard.
Throughout the nineties and still in early 2000s, the price for PC games in Germany had 40 Euros as a magical orientation mark. For Amiga and Atari ST in the 80s, it was first higher (often significantly, Falcon for example was 89 or 99 DM), then started to drop to the niveau most PC games had when PC took over and became more powerful than Amiga and ST. Playstation 1 games late 90s and early 2000s were around 50 Euros, often less, sometimes more. The most used pricetags were 39,99 DM for PC, and 49,99 DM for PS1 titles. And I do not talk of second hand games, which costed less than the half. And already back then people debated the excessive pricing. I have lived through all that. I do not estimate it - I know by memory, because I bought all that (playing computers since mid 80s). And then there were the fish disks for Amiga. LOL. Amiga. University. Being young. Little responsibility. Time was long, horizon was wide. That were good times! Zocken bis zum Morgen!
I think the future looks bright. They keep producing quality content, they update their old content. Game features are on the way although slower then we want but it will continue to be so until they manage to hire a programmer that they have been looking for a while.
I would prefer to see the current engine upgraded to DX12. UE4 tend to have the same-ish look that a lot of other games has while the engine feels like it is lacking in detail at times. UE4 has pop in issues that had been there since UE3. There are other racing games that is using UE4 such as Milestone games,Kartcraft and ACC. Personally, I prefer previous Milestone games and AC visuals over their newer games in UE4. Especially AC as their own engine has some capability to have some really sharp details on the models and roads. ACC looks a bit washed out to me, despite it has much better lighting engine. In terms of fps, ACC and newer Milestone games does not run as well in my experience compared to their older engine. In closing, I would prefer if racing games used their own engine than taking some off the shelf engine that will not do the job as well. The ISI engine that R3E used since GTR probably will do racing games better than UE4 since ISI engine is designed to do the job well. There is a reason why Call of Duty is still using that engine that is based on Quake 3.
My sim racing club and another club we race with are both in the process of moving over to R3E as we speak. The Black Friday deal lured a few in and players are jumping on board and really enjoying the game. Many had it but hadn’t played for years and said how much better it was. So not all is lost and I hope there is life yet in the game Been surprised how easy it was to fill up a public lobby. And equally surprised we can’t control the lobby by kicking people. Very surprised at that as it really hurts public lobby running which is where you meet new good players by keeping the place clean. Regardless, absolutely loving the game and having come from Project Cars2, which has fantastic graphics, I don’t have any problem with how R3E looks. Replays for one are much better than PCars2. Cars move much smoother and more naturally.
The past two evenings I did some nordschleifing online in RR. While the second evening was so la la regarding the number of players, the first evening really surprised me: when I played, there were over a dozen full servers with full driver fields, and many more servers full by two thirds and more, and I counted a bit and ended with a number of around 450-500 people being online, both public and locked servers. I was impressed. I usually see only one or two servers full (the free to play tracks), and a pityful sight of maybe 20 people scattered across the following six or eight servers, and the rest being empty.
Watching the RD stream kicking and ban drivers from servers will be added in patch next week. And next patch will be big about 20gb if i remember correctly.