Hello fellow racers! I would like to use this thread to express my opinion on the current state of the game. I knew about this game from its first appearance in Steam and I tried it out in 2013, but without having a wheel I couldn't fully appreaciate this game. Fast forward to 2019, I decided to retry it after many hours in AC and I have to admit, the sounds, the FFB, the general feel of the game gives a better experience. Even compared to rF2, this game is more enjoyable to me. Unfortunately, the confusing pricing model and the playercount in this game is not doing it a favor at all. I understand that the developpers have chosen the F2P model to ensure a bigger life span and attract more new players, but it doesn't seem to work very well. Just compare the average playercount on AC and R3E in 2019 in evenings. AC: 3500 R3E: 800 You can check it yourself out on SteamDB or other sites, I can't post links. As you can see, the game, that sells content in a traditional way manages to have a similar life span, while maintaining high playerbase (for a racing sim of course). The main thing that is offputting for the new players, is the amount of content, that should be purchased. Recently I tried to wrap my head around all this mess, and I came with a guide on Steam "Microtransactions Guide", that sums up everything the users of this forum already know. In this guide I have a link to a Google sheet, from which you can see that purchasing all content separately on purpose can get you up to 916 €. Hello iRacing. Not everyone who's new to R3E knows about the offer of 10K VRP for 65 € and Premium Pack, same goes for discount offers. Despite it's a mess, it's not even the 65 € that is a problem, but the regional pricing in Steam. For example you have some packs available on Steam, and those prices are regionally adjusted, but not all the content is present on Steam and when someone purchases that on Steam, Sector3 is only getting 70% of the money, so I don't see how it's interesting to them. A logical way of solving this problem and attracting more players is to introduce regional prices on the game store. A local currency for content and a reduced amount of VRP. Or maybe just more currency options for the purchases of the VRP, because right now it's only available in USD and EUR, which is simply not enough. The facts are: Simracing is a niche genre of video games, it's hard for casuals; Simracing is "for elite", as it usually requires one to buy a wheel with FFB, so the entry level is higher than for other games. You need to spend more than 100-150 € to get a decent one. R3E has "hard-to-understand" pricing model, which doesn't help one to establish a way of purchasing content. R3E requires you to purchase VRP in EUR or USD, essentially limiting the playerbase to the regions of North America and Western Europe. So already small playerbase is getting filtered out. I want that you understand, that I'm here not to whine about how it should all be free or the cost of one car should be reduced to some laughable numbers, as I understand that Sector3 needs to develop, but right now there's no equilibrium between supply and demand at least for aforementioned regions. I wish this game gets the same or similar attention as AC, because at the current state R3E is more enjoyable and feels superior, but is clearly overlooked. Thank you for getting through this wall of text. Best regards, Step.
Actually it is, people that don't see their prices adjusted according to their purchasing power parity, naturally will turn towards either PC2, AC, rF2 AMS and other games that can be purchased with all content on sale for like 15-25 €.
Coming from a € country i dont know exactly what someone from outside would see but id think that purchasing content in r3e through their steam wallet wouldnt look different currency wise than when they buy one of the other games on steam. The only difference is that its more expensive than going the vrp way or buying the other games.
When someone outside of EU is purchasing VRP packs, the RaceRoom store is set in euros, and the person has to buy it for exactly the same amount. When someone with a different currency is purchasing content via Steam wallet, the amount is the same, in €, but then converted to the currency of the Steam wallet. So the bad exchange rate can actually affect the price.
Well the exchange rate is what it is or does steam take an extra fee for the conversion? And if i use a credit card with a non €/$ currency on it to purchase vrp what exactly is different to when you have €/$ on that card?
There's no extra fee for the conversion, but the conversion itself is just not up-to-date, but that's not the main issue. If someone within non-EU country purchases content, he's charged the same amount in euros through conversion. Now you might say that it is logical, but in my opinion this is exactly what prevents the playerbase from growing. I'll show with an example. Let's compare the process of acquiring WTCC 2014 Car pack in this game. I assume that this pack is identical to the one we can purchase from the game site. In Steam this pack costs 9.00 € (amplified by 30 % to negate the Steam tax). This is the price for EU area. On the game site it costs 6.00 € (kind of its intended price) If someone decides to purchase this pack with Brazilian Real (R), he will pay 17,99 in Reals which corresponds to 4,23€. If he decides to buy this on the game site or from the game browser, he will be charged not at the reduced price, but at 6.00 €, which is equal to 25.50 Reals. Most importantly he will be charged from his Steam wallet. Doesn't seem like a big deal, but I didn't take it to the extreme level, there are much more cases like that. It should work in both directions, not just one way. The bundles featured on Steam do not represent the full content, moreover it's quite hard to determine what they do contain. For example what's the ADAC GT Masters 2014 Experience bundle? It's not the same as ADAC GT Masters Experience that includes 13, 14 and 15 years seasons. The content on Steam needs to be adjusted to the content featured on game's store. The regional prices and support of local currencies should also be present on the game's site, because clearly the devs have though about that, when they released some content on Steam. So they're ready for the differencies in purchasing power. You can always say that it's the price of the game and if someone cannot afford it, it's their problem, but the thing is, that the unlocked game content is not a physical merchandise that requires manufacturing, transporting, stocking and so on. The DLCs can be distributed in infinite quantities. So it makes sense to sell it cheaper in some regions to gain a bigger number of potential customers, than to filter only those who can afford to throw from 65 € to +100 €.
Oh i completely forgot those bundles on steam even existed thought we were talking about buying in the in game store but using your steam wallet to pay for it. I will disagree on selling it at different prices in different places tho. Otherwise id just set my steam account up to be in and pay in the currency of a dirt poor country and get all the game content for almoat nothing and i dont think id be the only one with that idea. Now i am definitely not a fan of their current business model but its gotta stay sustainable for sector 3. Besides if someone can afford a somewhat decent pc and a wheel then i wouldnt imagine them to be unable to afford a game for 65 to 100€
Steam normally doesn't allow changing the country to get better deals without physically changing it. Of course there are people that do that using VPN services, but normally they're getting banned for this. In fact, by selling those bundles on Steam, they partially sell content at somewhat lower price for different countries, but the content on Steam is not up-to-date. The only thing the devs would have to do is to implement something similar on their game store. So nobody would be able to fake their real location, and at the same time those, who were previously unable to purchase content would do it and increase playerbase. I partially agree with this. But someone with a decent PC and a wheel will have a choice, either he buys full content for R3E at 65 - 100 € or waits for Steam summer sale (or spring, winter) and buys all the other racing sims for like 30 € in total. And it's not fictional: the Ultimate Edition AC can go on like 10 €, Deluxe edition of PC2 around 13 €, and the rest can be spent on Automobilista and its DLCs. Whatever your income is, buying more at a lower price is always tempting.
Buying ALL the other racing sims for 30€ is as fictional as it could get. Ever heard of iracing? Now obviously id welcome a bigger playerbase for r3e but regionally adjusted prices still arent the way id wanna see. The only reason im paying so much for r3e is because the devs say that they gotta sell at certain prices to be able to profit. How would they all of a sudden be able to sell at a fraction? If the answer is theyve already got enough players for it to be profitable then theyre wont be that desperate to actually sell for less...
VRP shows in ££'s for me, £51.99 to be exact for 10k VRP. I would agree though that the visible pricing in Steam for new players may put them off and they probably may or may not know about the Raceroom shop which when compared to VRP is still expensive, it seems it's made to be quite hard to find that you can buy VRP, every new RRE racer who have joined us for the first time and wants to buy the game we have had to explain to them the best (cheapest) way to do it.
Yes, I mentioned iRacing in my previous post, but that's another story. That's not because there is a sim with a worst pricing model that I should be easy on R3E's one. I understand your motivation, but that's not how it works. Right now, with the prices R3E has, the game is affordable to only a small partition of players. Players beyond that partition do not contribute anything at all, because they're not interested. Once you introduce regional prices, this will allow additional income, you're not sacrificing anything. I.E. now you have ADAC GT Masters Experience pack for 33 € and then you introduce the same pack for a non-EU country for like 13 € and people can only buy content at the price for their region. Without the regional prices: 100 players buying ADAC pack for 33 € = 3300 €. Only 100 players with the same content. With the regional prices: 100 * 33 € + 100 * 13 € = 3300 € + 1300 € = 4600 €. 200 players with the same content. This is purely fictional, but it's the way it actually works.
Definitely not. I myself hate it when i complain about r3e being rather expensive and people say well iracing is worse so be happy with r3es prices. I just found it odd for you to wanna buy all sims for 30 bucks. And if we wanna call iracing an exception we might as well call ree one as well. And now that im speaking about iracing so much ill just throw in that the price is not what keeps r3es playerbase so low. Sure cheapers always nice but its not what primarily keeps this games playerbase from growing. What youre leaving out completely here is that people can buy whatever they want individually or in other packs as well. So to say sector 3 lives off premium pack purchases alone is quite a bold assumption to say the least. I for one never bought the premium pack, yet sector 3 have made plenty money off my purchases. Now regarding your example yes that is one way it could work. But they could just as well sell it for 20€ to everyone. You have your 100 eu players that would also buy it for more and you gain some new eu players and some new non eu players. Say thats another 100 players leaving us with 200 players and 4000€. A little less profit for sector 3 than your example but since they seem to be happy with the 3300€ they get from the 33€ deal they wont say no to additional income. Now we could go through hundreds of examples like this but at the end of the day the people in charge have already done that and found the current model to be a good solution. Another thing were ignoring here are the discounts for content you already own which makes the whole thing even more complicated and too much for me to go through now
There's no point in comparing the player numbers with AC, because probably only 800 out of the 3500 players are actually interested in racing...
And how many of those 800 players in R3E are actually racing? Because everytime I check MP there are two servers filled with people running either Aquila or Silhouette series cars. No GT3, no GT4, no open wheelers or DTM whatsoever. If somehow my arguments are not convincing, then try to explain, how come that such a simulator with great FFB, overall detail and optimization is still in the shadow of PC2 and AC, which have many problems unsolved. This game has as much players as the unfinished rF2.
With r3e having what most consider great ai all 800 could be racing and you might not even know about it And last time i checked i didnt count but id say there were about 300 people in multiplayer. Ill admit that this is a case of me leaving out some info to put that into perspective but you only finding two servers seems a little exaggerated as well (unless you play at unfortunate times). Look around this forum and youll see that r3e too has many unsolved problems (like perhaps most racing sims or even video games in general). Both ac and pc2 have the added appeal of road cars. Acs modability is a huge plus for them as well. Pc2 (and modded ac as well) offer things like the highly wished for feature of night racing which doesnt hurt either. And without wanting to get into the whole simcade and so on debate i think that pc2 is aimed at a different (larger) playerbase than r3e. Both those games being on console surely helps them with marketing and so on and so on. If you still think the only reason for the difference between r3e and for example pc2 or ac is the pricing model then so be it but ill continue to think that youre quite far off on that
the model is what it is , its not changing... the best way to buy ingame is by buying vrp"s , its cheaper remember you only need one car in each group to race in that group ; and the track pretty sure the people playing is how many are logged in to the game if you want to race more often , join a league in your time zone or one that you can make time to race in , or set up a league of your own if at the end of the day none of these options work for you , or fill your criteria , you can always walk away and play something else , its a free world (well at this level it is ) Andi
I agree, that maybe PC2 has better marketing and maybe a slightly different target audience. But you have to remember that AC was way ahead in the playercount even before their release on consoles. And it was also dubbed a hotlapping sim, without weather changes and night (it was successful way before the appearance of the night mods). Also many people asked Kunos to add more race cars, because they didn't consider road cars to be all that important. Meanwhile all that time R3E offered better physics and FFB, so it's hard for me not to tie this with the business model. Personally, it's offputting for me. I mean you have a free game, for which you have to buy additional content and which requires you to have Internet connection. What will happen when the game dies? I'll just lose that content or what? Because right now I can fire my copy of Race 07 and enjoy all the content. Back in the 2013-14 I bought some cars for VRP and now I lost that account. I know it's my fault and there was an announcement, but still, this just gives me a foundation for doubts. And I think I'm not alone with the same thinking, which explains low playerbase. That's a good advice, with the exception, that I'm pretty sure buying each car from each class separately will be well over 50-65 €. And what about tracks that are not included in European and American track packs? Here's the sheet that shows how much more it costs to buy everything separately. Regarding the changing of the business model I wouldn't be so sure, as I found several topics from this forum dating back to 2015, where people were asking for a more convenient way of selling cars and tracks in packs. Now, I see that the store is filled with packs. So I believe there's awlays place for an imporvement.
like i said it is how it is.... your prose are consistent , so the game doesnt meet your criteria.... you can keep argueing your point , but not everyone will agree with you Andi
Well even before console release and night mods ac had modding in general going for it. Also as far as i remember popular opinion was that ac had great physics certainly better than r3e. And even if many asked for racecars there still were plenty for whom mainly road cars were all they needed. Dont see why those people would come over to r3e. What may or may not have played another role in r3e not being super successful from the get go is the whole situation around the studio. I know far too little about it to properly comment on it but from what i hear it didnt always look like the studio was gonna continue to exist. And in that case not wanting to invest in a game far from finished seems fairly reasonable to me. But to sum it up once again im anything but a fan of their business model but its just one among many factors and surely not the main reason for the small playerbase (see iracing. If the product delivers you can get away with straight up robbery )