Okay, it seems that this topic inspires strong opinions with valid points of view. And often derails other valid threads, so lets keep it civil and discuss the issue, not flame and abuse each other, and maybe, just maybe we can come to some solution to help promote RRE as a game worth having, regardless of the sales model flaws. Personally, the biggest issue with RRE in my opinion is the cost of content, to put it into a word "EXPENSIVE" in fact it's currently the 2nd most expensive sim next to iRacing, and only due to the micro-transaction sales model. S3S is not in business to lose money either, and I understand this, coders, modellers etc all need to be paid wages, no one is arguing this. But the argument against the costs of buying the content is a very sore point for many, even after purchasing most of the content as I have, which in fact, is the most Ive ever spent on a single game in 18yrs of simracing and PC gaming, and yet there is more content on the horizon. Sure I don't have to purchase it, as many state, but this goes against human instinct, we humans want and desire the things we enjoy, even when we can't afford them, and in today's world, sales strategists understand this too and use it as a tool to garner more sales, also consider that for me the game feels incomplete because I don't have ALL the content, this feeling once again, is part of human desire. It's also part of the sales strategy in a competitive psychoanalytic marketing world, and it leaves me feeling like a "cash cow, being gently milked". The way I see it, S3S either didn't realise, or ignored the fact that the simracing community had already woken up to the negative financial aspect of micro-transaction purchasing of content via iRacing, which left a lingering bitter after taste, which hurt iRacing numbers, plus add the fact the content is not on your PC, and purely online is/was another massive deterrent to the community. If S3S went broke tomorrow, the question is "do we still have access to our purchased content?", if not, that's not providing security to the consumer, so why should the consumer take part and invest their money and provide security for the developer. (No Moding, The Pro's & Con's) Another reason this title is struggling in my opinion, is the lack of modding, considering every previous title released by Simbin was "pro modding", it was a huge blow to the modding community to realise the restructured Simbin, Sector 3 Studio's, was taking a zero mods attitude with RRE. This naturally sparked a mass migration of simracers & moders to other Sims. Who have welcomed them with open arms, in fact they've gone out of their way to accommodate them in many ways. They understand that modding promotes longevity, and that longevity will promote sales long after official support has stopped. Which was the case with GTR, GTR2 & EVO, titles still played and modded today, years after support has ceased. (be interesting to see if they still sell on steam) Modding is a key to user numbers and longevity in today's Simracing genre, the past is testament to that, we only need to look at rF1 or the GTR series to see the evidence, even if it's just allowing add-on liveries as is the case with some titles at present, it's involving the community, which has exploded in the past 2 yrs with the promotion & sales of Sim titles on Steam. Which is positive for our Hobby/Sport. I don't believe S3S will achieve anything close to the user numbers they enjoyed as Simbin with the GTR series, not while other sim titles are offering so much more for a fraction of the price, add modding to that equation and regardless of the quality it's always going to be hard for S3S/RRE to come close to their competition. Maybe their happy with the small following who are loyal financial supporters, but I don't believe that to be the case. I have supported S3S/RRE financially as I feel they produce a quality racing simulation, but I can not justify spending more money on future content, and it's obvious I'm not alone. Will S3S do something to correct it, who knows, I think only time will tell.
My take on all this stuff is a little different. Regarding modding, I personally don't see it as an important factor. I know that some modders are making brilliant stuff for some games, but I haven't got the time or energy to work through the necessary steps to import them, test them, update them, etc. And while some mods are great a lot really aren't. I have RFactor2 and quickly get fed up with wading through a sea of confusing and unfinished stuff looking for the emerald in the mountain of coal. I've always preferred 1st party content and the stuff S3 are putting out isn't exactly lacking in quality. Regarding the business model, the concept of a core game engine with very different car / track packs which are effectively separate games was always an ambitious and tricky goal. The ADAC GT 2014 and DTM 2014 experiences are the two best examples of this approach. I bought 'em both and think they were decent value for money. IIRC £16 for GTM which had cars I wanted to race and 8 or 9 great tracks, with a proper standalone GTM game 'feel'. Same for DTM 2014. I'm looking forward to what the ADAC GTM 2015 pack / experience has to offer. I personally don't mind the pricing approach. I do think some better discounts need to be applied for players who own older versions of similar content or have lots of stuff already. The core R3E game mode desperately needs fleshing out (pit stops, results / stats, AI improvements, damage modelling, multiplayer enhancements, etc) to make the content people buy better value for money. I also think that if S3 / RaceRoom want to consider R3E as 'software as a service' type stuff, they need to look into providing better management of multiplayer racing - not quite as strict (or stressful...) as iRacing's approach, but something more closely managed & monitored than the current free-for-all, with some kind of player progression and incentives to race like a racing driver, rather than a moron
You say desperately but to be honest its consonantly being worked on. I think they need to have done nothing for a little longer before we can say things are getting desperate considering the ai had a huge update not that long ago that overhauled them. I know nitpicking and whatnot.
Are we really gonna start this conversation again? We went through this many times on this forums, and i don't think there is any reason to start it all over again. With no offense: - S3S decided to use this business modell, and only they have a clear view about its success or failure. I'm sure they have the proper person to check their financlial status and make the decision about their business modell in case of need. Most of these guys came from SimBin, where they were using the classic modell which lead to a bankrupcy... are you sure that was better? - Expensive.... Imo you should look aorund the software market before you say that. Probably if you only look the racing titles, you can say that R3E is not the cheapest, but it is not expensice at all. My daughter palying a freakin fantasy game on my phone, and a dragon cost around 50 euro , and you can't really do anything like flying or controlling it in the game...and there are at least 50 different types of dragons in game....that is what i call expensive.... As you mentioned, you dont have to buy all the content, especially not all the cars so even if you have to be carefull on spending your money, you can put together a good starter package for a reasonable price, and if you want to buy things just for your collection, wait for sales. - Expensive no2: i have had this expample before, but when when you say "expensive", lets look around you and just think about how much money you are spending on other things: McDonalds 10 euro for 5 minutes, movie 15 euro for 2 hours, and probably you will not even like what you see, Nike shoes 100 euro, but the 30 euro noname prolly would do the same without the fancy logo on side, TV subscription 30-50 euro per month, and most probably you will not watch it for more than 20 hours per month... R3E average monthly 10 euros for at least 25 hours of fun per month.... seriously...what is expensive in that.... - Expensive no3: when you buy content you are not paying because you would like to support the studio (if you want to do that you just send some money for them without expecting anything back directly, that is support in my view) but because you would like to play the game and use the new content.... when you go to McDonalds, are you going because you want to support McDonalds? No man, you are going because you are hungry, and you decided to buy their product. Would say lets try to handle software business on the same way.... - Mods: i'm not a big fun of mods, mostly because of their quality and the way how softwares handle them. Even in rFactor it was a pain to deal with different mods and their 1 million versions, and rFactor built to be modded. In theory of course this would be the perfect way to get additional content to your favourite game, especially content what the developer not planning to include into the title. But it seems R3E trying to listen to the community and set up their future plans accordingly, we will get couple of desired tracks soon, new series are on their way, they are working on openwheelers, etc... of course it takes some time, but at least mostly you can be sure in the quality of the new content. over and out
As has been said, this has been debated to death already. All I will say is I'm puzzled why the OP thinks iRacing have struggled because of their business model. Iracing have focused on a niche part of the sim-racing community - the on-line racer. On-line racers make up 10-20% of simracers. This is why their membership figures of 50,000 or so might not seem impressive against pCARs and AC sales of over 200,000 copies on Steam. However, within that niche iRacing completely dominate - no other racing sim comes close with numbers of people racing on-line. I would add that for me the biggest isue I have with iRacing's model is the on-going fee to use content you've bought rather than the micro-transactions for content. At least S3S has avoided that.
Useless debate, but wth. You say which, I'm sorry to say it again, is a wrong conclusion. If you think it's expensive, ok, I even agree that prices might be too high a little. I also think more people would give it a shot if it was more affordable. But how is that linked to the microtransactions? If they would keep everything the way it is, business model, store, everything, but lowered prices by lets just for the fun of it say 90%, would you still say the business model is failing? Mods (off topic, just saying) what mr_b said, most are shite. And if modability were a real factor in a sims success rf2 should be doing way better than it is and there should be much more, or at least any mods for pCars (there's a bunch of liveries and that's it). AC has some and most are useless. It sure would be nice to have the option, but seeing how shamelessly SimBin content has been ripped in the past I can totally understand their reluctance to open their files.
First of all I'm glad there's now a thread to discuss pricing, model, etc instead of it taking away from the discussion of other threads on the forum. For the most part, I'm fine with the pricing and model. My sole complaint about pricing is that I wish the skins were included with the price of the car and then if additional skins are released later, I'd be fine with paying for those. At the same time, those skins were designed by someone whom S3S had to pay, so I totally understand charging for skins. The prices of the tracks are fair and so are the prices of the cars and for the hours of enjoyment I've gotten out of the content I purchased, I feel like I'm the one "cheating" S3S and RRE instead of the other way around. As for car/track modding, I don't want it. This is one of the few games in my library that I start up and it just works. The tracks all work, the cars all work. There's no fiddling to try and get a track or car to run, no scouring the internet for hours trying to find a particular track for the car I'm running. It has a built in championship creator that's easy (no editing gdb files, etc). I enjoy the experiences and the DTM experience is what brought me here to begin with. I'm very pleased with the mods created by mr_belowski and Stefan and feel they add greatly to the game (I'd love to see both included if possible by default) but that's about as far as I want modding to go for this title. I don't need a custom skin with "Jims Bait Shop" on it, but I do understand both sides of the custom skins argument. S3S has to protect their intellectual property and if the only way they can do that is by not allowing modding then I'm A-Ok with that. If I want a game with mods, then I can fire up GTR2, Race07, NR2003, AC, or rFactor. I do agree that some work needs to be done under the hood for the sim (flags, etc) but realize at the same time that this is a small team that's doing some amazing work. The content artists aren't the same folks who do the under the hood stuff. Call me an R3E apologist if you'd like, but this is my favorite sim and the one that I've played far more than any other. This is the pricing and business model that's being used and as I said in the thread yesterday, either buy the content or don't buy it. I don't feel comfortable discussing someone else's business plan without knowing the full story and frankly the "full story" is none of my business. These contracts were negotiated by the team with this model in mind and the inner workings of those contracts are none of my business. There's a saying in the US about enjoying hot dogs but only because you don't know how they're made. I feel that applies here. I can truly enjoy R3E without knowing how it's made. Yes, I just compared S3S to a hotdog making plant. I'll stop now
For me the Business-model is ok. It isn't something i fell in love with, but i can deal with it. But to be honest - to compare it with a Smartphone-App: If i download an app and in the discription is mentioned that it can contain in app "buys", I always get a bad feeling. There are two things that bother me most: 1. Liveries: As I don't like buying for liveries I understand that creating a livery costs money. But the amount of Liveries for a single car-model makes the price for a single car with all liveries quite expensive - and that has an effect on the pack-prices as well. Possible Solution for that: Making packs with all liveries for a car (class-dependet) with a solid discount. In the car-pack, that packs could be included instead of the single liveries. The Discount for car-packs could be reduced a bit to keep the price on the same level 2. The vRP-System: At the moment it is possible to buy in normal currency and in vRP. That's great in general but a but confusing for someone who don't know where to buy vRP. Possible Solution: If possible, integrate it in the shop again, as it was in the earlier days. And maybe a Popup should come up that hints where to buy more vRP, if you don't have enough vRP for the content in your shopping-cart. It should clarify that you will get an additional discount. Something like: "You need 999vRP more to buy that content. Buy vRP here in advance to get an additional Discount. Otherwise, you can pay the difference in your currency."
Here here! Wouldn't mind if S3 maybe added some historic liveries just to up the numbers with some cars apart from that very happy with the path S3 are leading me, feel like a teenager buying his first condom every time new content is even mentioned!
I think regional prices on the ingame store would be great too, the Euro is 4 times the Real (brazilian currency) so the game gets really expensive for us brazilians.
The business model isn't great, but not the worst either. At least you get what you pay for. I once played a shooter game where you had to gamble for exclusives (low winning rates) or spend tons (€100 to €150) to assure you got a rare. I bought 3 weapons for nearly 400 euro... The great thing here is that you can buy one car per class and join every room. I purchased one pack (DTM 2014) and one car (from WTCC 2014) and I would recommend the car design, sound and handling, but the overall lack of features (such as flags, formation laps, etc.) and current price rate holds me back from buying more. Race 07 and GTR2 offer complete packs, are much cheaper and had all features nearly ten years ago already.
There's no point at selling vrp pack on the in-game store. Either you don't have vrp and you pay content directly though steam => you see the exact amount it cost you in your currency during the process. Going this way as it's a in-app purchase of the steam market there's a fee on the transaction that goes on steam pocket. Either you want cheaper VRP, then you NEED to buy them outside of steam market, to avoid the steam fee. The vrp you buy on raceroom store website are 30% cheaper only because you avoid the steam transaction fee. It will be a non sens to go back to the old system: buying vrp packs on steam because you'll not get any discount and pay for vrp at higher price. Since they have change the system you don't have to buy VRP in advance to be able to purchase content. You buy content, it will cost you a certain amount of vrp that will automatically translate in the exact amount needed in your currency while making the transaction on steam market. You can have 0 vrp on your account and be able to purchase content as you want, you'll only need to be able to pay content on your steam account.
In the early days you've got a discount on buying vRP in the ingame Store. I've just checked my Transaction-History. 5000vRP-Pack costs 39,99EUR before it was excluded from the store. So yeah, it was 5€ more than now but still a Discount from 10€. The idea, not to buy with vRP and pay with your Currency instead can remain as it is now. But an additional Information to other possible solutions should be given...
@mr_belowski and @m.bohlken We think quite alike in this matter. I'm not a big fan off modding. I do use em, and there are some really awesome ones out there! But there is also a lots of crappy ones, and I much rather pay for real quality content from the developers than use mods. There have been a ton of improvements to the pricing only since I came aboard a year ago! Back then we didn't have packs or discount for owned content.. And with the approach of releasing new content and getting old content into packs will make it cheaper. But the liveries is a bitt of a problem as stated, makes some packs unreasonably expensive.. (GTR2 and probably GTR3) I would say lower the livery prices, or include them with the cars if bought in a pack. And also to get leagues more involved make some kind of custom liveries possible along with full flag system and this: A nice addition would also be if we could change to our own names on the cars. Then as said, bring back the bundle Vrp in the store. And also add a loyalty bonus discount based on amount of content owned for the true fans / collectors!
Modding is great when talented teams make the mods; mod making groups such as URD, DRM modding Team, Virtua Simulazioni and the people at gtlw.co.uk (P&G) make very high quality mods. Then there are the rest which range from great scratch made cars and tracks to poorly converted rips down to the hobbyist having a crack at making something. Sadly the latter catagory is where I'd rate the vast majority of the mods I've tried. I own all of the URD cars for rF2 and AC. They look great, sound good and drive well. Shame I don't have many high quality DTM or WEC tracks to race the cars on. The beauty of what Sector 3 are doing is we are getting the full experience with licenced cars and tracks recreated as best as professionals can with the feedback of real world drivers. I do agree the pricing structure is a little steep however car, track and series licences are costly and it's reflected in the price of the experiences or cars. Asking money for liveries on cars one has just purchased is a bit much IMO. At least Sector 3 have decent and long running sales for its customer base. Hopefully the core gameplay aspects people are asking for come sooner rather than later to justify the faith people have in R3E. I'm sure the small dev team would like nothing more than to have the majority of requested features available to their customers ASAP. Cheers.
Modding is a chance, but always also a risk for the producer. Competent modders knowing the subject of a sim very well, can do good things. Dreamers, fantasy heroes and so forth can ruin the gamebalance quite easily by creating LSD-driven mods, ruining MP - and that is what needs to be considered. Many people say that they do not like R3E being non-moddable, for them modding is part of the hobby: if they can't mod, they lose interest immediately. Some even do more modding than playing. Personally, I have no problem with the non-moddability of R3E at all, I also accepted that they did not allow mod planes in Condor (soaring simulator), and only cosmetic mods (sounds, skins, missions, but no platforms, sensors and weapons) in Steal Beasts Pro. It has its advantages: keeping the physics intact. Thankfully, I am no collector, I do not need hundreds of cars and tracks, and Raceroom already offers more cars than I frequently can drive, and has a more than just sufficient collection of tracks, some really much-wanted ones amongst them.
Actually Sonat mentioned that things have changed quite some from SimBin to s3s, SimBin still started the whole project, not s3s. Also J-F mentioned in the past that he doesn't think everything is perfect as is (if I recall correctly). There is probably a good deal of restrictions in place from the existing licensing terms. So whatever model we currently have is not set in stone, but it may be not too easy to change. Personally I am okay with not having a "single full game" anymore, that model is past anyway (see all the DLCs, season pass..), as long as there is progress on all fronts. Therefore favor the "pack" oriented buying. Whenever there is discounts and packs available one gets rather good value out of things. Also the packs seem pretty permanent now, so imo s3s has moved in the right direction here already. As @mr_belowski mentioned the core game still suffers a bit for newcomers. Already mentioned this suggestion in past, but basically I would make buying one starter pack mandatory for the "game", and make only the competitions and maybe one "sp-race of the week" for free (as well as test-drive...). The rest behind a pay wall, maybe 15-20€. That in theory keeps sponsors happy (all the ADAC/DTM PR still available via the free competitions), and buy getting some "car pack + track apack" to begin with, newcomers in theory then have a better experience. This would kill "free mp", but imo it's better to have people that invested at least something into a game and take it slightly more serious, than anyone racing. The other thing that would be beneficial is get all classes on similar quality level (or remove them/condense them, label them by their quality). Mods are not crucial here as long as the content quality bar is kept well. But I have no doubt that this is a goal by s3s anyway. And as @Drei pointed out, we don't have the data on the business details... and to be frank it's not our business
Hello Insaneozzy, With all due respect, I disagree with you on both subjects: Micro-transactions I think most of us are already tired of hearing about this micro-transactions subject, but I still want to leave my opinion here: I'm perfectly happy with this system, and I don't even think the cost is high. If you divide the cost of a car per hours that you drive in it, it becomes pretty insignificant doesn't it? This system, because it allows me to choose what cars and tracks I want, let's me build my sim according to my tastes. Also, if there were selling the entire game, and then having to buy DLC's to access new content, what would happen is that I would probably spend more money, and have tracks and cars that I would never drive, just to get one or another car/track in the DLC. Modding Please, no modding! If modding were to be allowed, I would either ignore it or even stop using the game (in the event that S3S would stop producing quality content because modders would "replace" them). No one wants a game with varying quality degrees between cars and tracks, or even unfinished cars or tracks. Could modders produce/record/setup the sound the same way Anthony does? Well, I don't really think so.
Alex, agree entirely with first point as for the second I have no problem if one of the big modding teams wants to attempt to recreate certain cars/tracks BUT it would have to be approved by the Devs and personally I think any modder would fall short of the quality the sim deserves, in reality it would have to improve things and that is a mighty task! As for the App devs bring 'em on, crew chief and dashboard are both quality, sim improving addons (keep up the good work guys). So in a way I kinda agree with your second but got to dangle a carrot!!