I for one would like to see RF2 morph into an Iracing competitor. Best physics and FFB in the industry with best online structure too? Yes please! I would be very happy to support an annual subscription if this happened.
Also, I don't think we should be trying to take on iRacing's model. There are plenty of people who don't like it already. I think S397 have a clear idea of where they want to take RF2 and they have shared a few thoughts with us already in the road maps.
The subscription was removed for a reason by S397 less than a year ago. I think iRacing's business model is also failing sooner or later, the more content they keep releasing, the more split the community will become, and the harder it will be to find races. The overwhelming majority of games have moved to a business model where the game itself has no annual costs and only a small initial payment, and costs are from DLC items.
So far the GT3 pack sales are about 36000€ according to suscriptions. With this money you have to pay the modder, the license and steam. How much do you get for developing the product? What works for a game with 500.000 owners, doesn't if you only have 60.000 and less that 2000 buy the DLC.
Man oh man.. the drama is real. rF2 is starting at a point better than iRacing was when they started (and the pack + other changes haven't even been released yet) when is about a online comp system. Just give it time, especially the time to release it!. People rarely pop out of nowhere to play a game. Geez.
Today public racing is totally dead and many leagues are struggling to keep their members. Dream on baby dram on....
I'm not entirely sure why S397 didn't just acquire the intellectual property and then release a new game called rF3, built largely from it, either. It would have given them a substantial boost in revenue which could have funded things moving forward. S397 seem to have, for the time being, abandoned the idea of a subscription fee (for online racing); thus more like the free-to-play model of R3E, except, there is an up-front payment for the game + some base content, which I actually think is a better deal by S397. The question is, where is growth going to come from for rF2? I'm not sure I know how to interpret the stats from Steam, but I believe the participation numbers is anyone who is running the game whether online or offline. If that is right, from this I would deduce that not many people are using it offline (because we know there are very few online, those that are, are locked down leagues often running custom mods or payware mods). When you've got competition like iRacing on the online side, who have a subscription model, it can be tempting to want to reproduce that since we've not seen any of the non-subscription devs really get a significant number of online users. I have asked myself the question "where is the main value for me" in using iRacing, and its mainly in the structured online competition (both pickup/official series and leagues with how they are implemented) rather than in the actual fidelity of the simulation itself. So I would argue, I should (and would) pay MORE for the subscription ($99) or some scheme where I paid a base subscription and then an 'entry fee' per structured race series I wanted to access (official primarily, probably still best to have league owners fund their own). If rF2 going forward is going to put more emphasis on online competition, and especially if they structure it/host it in official events, to not charge a subscription or fee for that seems to be problematic, and having the no-fee option as the only real way to compete with iRacing, I'm not sure that will win. I think its possible to have a better sim (physics, graphics) than iRacing, but S397 are also challenged in that they don't have many truly great cars (FR 3.5 is head and shoulders above all others, maybe the BTCC Honda, FF2000 and GT500 - and yes, I know lots like the historic open wheelers but really they aren't that good) and primarily they lack laserscanned tracks which are so clearly superior. Frankly if the online structure isn't good enough, then I won't make a break from iRacing for online and I'll do the occasional offline session. It stands alone as a capability, which is why I'm not about to spend money on rF2 DLC (GT3 pack) without knowing anything about what is going to be offered as the online structure; no point in buying content I'm not going to use, which is the same position I am in with R3E. With PC2, I've got both a lot of content and now some online structure that we'll have to see whether that is enough (don't think it is). If you've got a good mod and are able to race it online in a league where the strengths come out (mainly endurance racing, team-events plus day-night which iRacing doesn't have) then rF2 makes sense. Other than this, there's not enough value in a poorly implemented mod (or even base content like the DW12) even if the rF2 base simulation is better than iRacing. It's proven by the current numbers. There aren't enough small niches to make rF2 a viable platform offline+online. The GT3 pack is critical to get some 'mass', and really, it needs the main brands (Ferrari or Porsche) into the bargain.
If they got the numbers the online could work like iracing,I know so many over there that are so frustrated with the driving experience,mainly the tyre model that they all say the perfect sim would be rf2 with the online structure of iracing. If they could get enough members the online could work along side already established leagues,heck iracing has both I don't see why rf2 couldn't,given enough time and members. Leagues should not take president over the future of the game anyway in my view
I prefer a system like Raceroom over the iRacing one, you pay only for the content you want to play and no more...public servers and a couple of official ones with the new online tools will do the rest...
Look at steamcharts.com and then compare active players to what you see in the multiplayer lobby. Active players are marginally higher than R3E, at the same time of day. I used to see about 80% of rF2 active players as being online with other race sims in the 50-70%, but I think that has shifted downwards so rF2 is about 70% online. Hard to accurately judge since we don't have an easy way to see how many online players are actually AI, though it's easy to subtract the servers known to be routinely running AI. *** Where is growth going to come from? Well there's all those pCARS 2 players that came out of the woodwork. The number of people playing pCARS 2 was about equal to all the other racing games added together, yet hasn't subtracted from the other games totals (excepting original pCARS). What I can't figure is how many of them are console players and how many are PC...
I think there are a lot of rf2 users who are OFFLINE users (like me). I can not be sure. I also believe that these offline users use much less forums like this and are in this case less represented. Their expectations are therefore in part different. Me I accumulate about 20000km of piloting in the real life and I use rf2 to train me. As a result, my expectations around the cars simulators are physics / ffb, the highest quality cars in terms of FFB / physics (ISI cars basically), aquaplanning management (not included in rf2), real accurates and detailed tracks (laser scanned, even if the graphics are not at the top.) From this point of view, rf2 has an interesting basis.
That's 103 players indicated as online, but we know at least 10 are AI (and maybe as many as 35). If you check steamcharts.com, you can see 408 people had rF2 running at the time you posted. So online players are now significantly below offline players.
Just forget steamcharts.com just look in to multiplayer lobby and it gives clear picture how dead rFactor 2 online racing is. 80% of the servers you see in multiplayer lobby is impossible to join. GetMod don`t work or there is some other issue/error and when you finally find one working server it is loaded with AI`s. I am hosting 8 public servers at the moment and last 60 days there is 6 players who has joined my servers. I am also monitoring some league`s and I can clearly see that number of players is getting lower and lower all the time.
rFactor 2 is too resource heavy for how it looks. DirectX9 graphics for quite a lot of content, while performance isn't good. If S397 manages to make rFactor 2 look completely like a modern simulator, while keeping the performance of them (like Assetto Corsa), it would be great. Sadly a lot of mods still look terrible and probably won't get an upgrade in the graphics department.
Totally right. Performance is very bad and absolutely not optimized. With gtx 780 Assetto corsa : better graphics FULL ultra. TOTALLY SMOOTH Rf2 dx11 : totally full graphics = sometimes 20fps, absolutely not smooth and poor graphics compared to AC (yes yes that's a beta but.....)