Lifetime membership

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Gjon Camaj, Nov 4, 2011.

  1. CordellCahill

    CordellCahill Registered

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    It's a hobby, and some of us invest a lot of time into it. This is where the problem lies, assuring that our hard work will always be usable.
     
  2. Jim Beam

    Jim Beam Registered

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    maybe ISI can wear tin foil hats...thatll atleast take the alien scenario out of the picture :p
     
  3. Derek Speare

    Derek Speare Registered

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    Make it the very best racing sim ever to be released, and you will have your customers' loyalty for a lifetime. You already do. Just blow them away with this next release.

    d
     
  4. Lazza

    Lazza Registered

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    A lot of people 'invest' a lot of time in rFactor... I don't really like the word invest though, because it seems to imply you want to get returns from it in future.

    You can spend a lot of time on a lot of things, and for whatever reason suddenly have to stop or start from scratch. If that really bothers your group that much I'm amazed you can commit to anything.

    I don't understand the attraction to 'lifetime membership'... or maybe I'm just cynical, because Gjon didn't actually say he meant the ability to play rF2 even if the MM service dies. From what I can see what he's referring to could easily be taken to mean a larger one-off fee for 'forever' access to the rF2 MM - as long as it's running. If it goes down for whatever reason, neither the 'yearly subscribers' nor the 'lifers' could do anything about it. Unless I've missed something? :)
     
  5. 88mphTim

    88mphTim racesimcentral.net

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    Suzie's now sleeping like a baby (she is one). :)

    The attraction for some will be that they'll only need to take their card out of their wallet once. Whatever the reason is, some simply don't like to have something they'll have to remember to do each year. It's pretty common actually for people to still fear internet transactions and those folks would probably appreciate a single transaction.

    The lifers also possibly end up paying less through the lifetime of the product... As rF2 could live longer than the combination of the initial+yearly payments would be to make that lifetime amount... But those details haven't been discussed within the company yet.

    AFAIK lifetime memberships to pretty much anything always carry a disclaimer that lifetime means lifetime of the product and/or service. It's probably obvious that that is what it means, but I'm just making folks 100% aware of that. What's basically being offered is a single price for the lifetime of rF2, not a guarantee that ISI will make sure rF2 works until every single one of you passes away (your lifetime). (I just pictured Gjon's skeleton sat at a computer with cobwebs all over it). ;)
     
  6. Lazza

    Lazza Registered

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    Hmm... not sure the league I'm in was looking for rF2 to provide such an option, we might have to reconsider :p
     
  7. Slothman

    Slothman Registered

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    Umm...heres something you might get some use out of..

    A hobby is not taken up to save money, its taken up to HAVE FUN!!!!

    A hobby is not a business, or an investment, or anything else but FUN!!!

    It appears quite a lot on these forums have lost the sight of that.
     
  8. Nibo

    Nibo Registered

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    Exactly, Tim. Some people can forget, some may just be lazy or to occupied to pay for subscription. And also, I say this 10th time (sorry), if person in our region does not have paypal or top level credit card it will be tricky to do the payment. So if we will be able to pay once, it will be much easier, so more people here will buy rF2, more ppl will be in our leagues, more profit to ISI :)
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Nov 6, 2011
  9. orangutan

    orangutan Registered

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    OK, fine, back for just one more fish.

    There is a misunderstanding here wrt the issue for hobbyist modders and leagues. Lifetime is not a solution. And to be honest, the Trymedia thing is not something I'd trust either with the time we subsequently learned good modding and meta modding takes (our league does a bit more than just pump out mods...teams develop independent cars and we generate a mod. Up to weekly. And reliably update/sync to all members.)

    That is non trivial.

    And if we knew that's where we'd end up, we'd have not bit on the rF1 Trymedia arrangement. But we sort of evolved our league from just an off-the-shelf league to this point. And we were fortunate ISI/rF1 did not fold or get bought out. Now that our appetite is whetted, we have more grandiose ideas for our league and mod's slant.

    ISI can do what they want for sure. I appreciate that we not only have this forum in the first place, but that Wheatley is hyper active on it. That is most uncommon. Again, that part is appreciated.

    But unfortunately even "lifetime", as discussed here, is not what our particular league and mod can buy into. The critical aspect is the phone home part. Say for example, that rF2 is reasonably successful as a service, and also a grand thorn in iRacing's side. ISI, as Wheatley says, is already sitting pretty with other business (rF Pro, etc). It does seem possible, just as an example of a lot of possible things, that Roush Fenway iRacing might make a tempting offer for rF2/MM, if even just to shut it down. Everyone has a price. That's business.

    Now in my day job we license some big time studio tools and develop a LOT on them and integrate them into our pipeline. For all of them we have contracts such that if those packages or their companies fold or sell, we get the source for those packages. A contingency clause.

    That's all we ask in the worst case. A contingency clause. If MM shuts down, we, by contract, get a patch that frees us from requiring connection to MM to play online on our own servers. I do not see how this is a problem, UNLESS ISI is reserving the value of being able to kill online rF2 outright (say, like rF2 was bought with the explicit intention of killing competition for something else). But then again I am not privy, and cannot be, to ISI's business planning. Nor should I be. But I have to guess before I make my 'business' decision (a business not to make money, but to invest time for a pleasure reward). There could be any other reason behind their doors. No matter. I have to make risk/reward decisions based on what I know.

    I also understand that ISI has made the decision that that is not the road they choose. This is no longer a lobby to sway any decision. The decision is made. I only post again because I think at least the position I had sort of got muddied away and I do not like being misunderstood. ISI simply chose a path we cannot follow with our modding ambitions. So we won't. No biggie. There are other paths for us. I just wanted to be clear why we are opting away from rF2 for future modding. It is not the money (I'd personally pay even a years worth of iRacing money, so upwards of $500, for a non-phone-home rF2). It is not paranoia. It is not emotional. It is not religious. It is simple risk/reward analysis from the information we have.

    BTW, a simple calculation of the 'risk' we put atop rF1 is probably upwards of $200k, based on the salaries and time of the engineers and artists who did so. I'd guess most high effort mods are at least that high in market value time. Now with that kind of number, maybe it makes a but more sense why even a 5% chance that MM could shut down is not acceptable for this sort of investment. So like I said, we'll just invest elsewhere. Not a problem.
     
  10. Jim Beam

    Jim Beam Registered

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    are you talking about gridmotorsports here?
     
  11. Nimugp

    Nimugp Registered

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    +1
     
  12. MarcG

    MarcG Registered

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    I'd prefer a one off payment but right before xmas is a no go for me, perfectly happy to stick to subs forever more.
     
  13. Foxtrot

    Foxtrot Registered

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    Hi.

    Does iracing really cost that much? Sheesh, I am happy I stayed out of that.

    I'm really curious which sims former RF leagues would switch to. As far as I know nothing has the featureset, modability and netcode of RF2. If there are better options why do people still run RF1 leagues. I'd offer humble advice to league organizers to really make sure the memberbase agrees with you first, or you just might kill your own league.
     
  14. Revvin

    Revvin Registered

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    Is that a 'no' for next weeks winning lottery numbers then as well? :)
     
  15. Mauro

    Mauro Registered

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    +2 :)
     
  16. killerwatt

    killerwatt Registered

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    Well I am going to be 61 on 2nd December, and I will go for the lifetime subscription. It's gonna be interesting seeing which one of us pegs it first, me or rFactor2 :confused: Can you please hurry with the release? I may not have much time left! :p
     
  17. codehound

    codehound Registered

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    Well, I am 67 so I think you and I deserve some kind of discount on life time membership. :)
     
  18. orangutan

    orangutan Registered

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    There are options for leagues who do not mod, or need mods. I am not sure if it would be 'rude' to mention names here though.

    There are not better options for a modding league like our league right now than rF1. rF is definitely, wrt architecture and completeness the best modding platform right now. That does not mean it is the best possible. That is why we lobbied for some change in the first place. Given the amount and nature of the resources we have, launching a well architected OSS 'cathedral' to seed a 'bazaar' around is certainly an option (see ESR's Cathedral and Bazaar paper...or think linux in the OS space). We are not underestimating the size of such an undertaking. We would have to be well into Bazaar phase before we would have anything truly competitive. Note that this does not preclude using rF2, one of the other sims, or even rF1, without any mod development, while we work on our own next thing...which would admittedly be "years" before anything close to competitive could be fielded.

    You are correct. We should be sure the league is in on whatever we do. And we do indeed have a lively discussion going on our own forum.
     
  19. the_last_name_left

    the_last_name_left Registered

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    lol

    haha

    More lols.

    But if it were the case that ISI/MM were such a threat to iRacing, why would ISI sell-up? Maybe ISI would buy iRacing and close them down instead? :D None of those scenarios seems very likely, and anyway....there's little ISI can do about all that. If they were given sufficient spondoos to close-down, who could blame them? And it just isn't very likely is it? "More's the pity!!", I imagine Mr Camaj and co lamenting. lol. Here's a fortune - put your feet up - go on holiday forever! Hell, why not? How likely is it? haha

    Why not commit your resources and go for it - there's no crystal ball? If there's a calamity and you end up regretting it.....well....c'est la vie.....? Nobody can promise there won't be. But how likely is it? If you commit, it's less likely there will be a calamity, no?
     
  20. orangutan

    orangutan Registered

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    Likely enough. Even 5% chance, when the 'risk' we (our developers in just "mod" development) are talking about is 6 figure equivalent. Why does any company buy any other? Many reasons. We cannot know. Point is, it is easy to fix, with no loss whatsoever to ISI, unless they are reserving 'value' for exactly such a scenario. That being the guaranteed patch contingency.

    Note, I am NOT arguing against myself, or even our league, from using rF2 as a non-modding racing platform. In fact, we may do exactly that. I am arguing against doing any serious modding investment upon rF2.

    That is looking likely, especially since we already have a robust simulation framework to build on. Still, this path has much higher risk and reward numbers, and a ratio we are still getting a handle on. Like I said, I am no longer really trying to convince ISI of anything. I am just making sure my point is clear, just because I am already sort of 'into' this discussion. I am fine with them doing whatever they want, and we are just making our own decisions based on the landscape that ISI/rF happens to be part of.
     

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