S397 are free to do what they want. But if they want to be successful in either the short or long term, they have to start looking at the tactical decisions they are making, and the criteria with which they are making them.
There are two really big issues with the CS right now: first, to run a series you need all the content from all events in that series, to run any given event; second, there is a need to own all the content from any given event e.g. all GT3 cars plus the track, not just the specific car you wish to drive. These issues are common to ALL sims. And every single one of them, even those on Steam, have overcome them. iRacing had the latter restriction, and it was important enough to them to correct it. Why would that not apply here? It's S397s decision to utilize the Steam software in such a way that you have to own everything. And there is no sim, anywhere, that has ever had the first restriction - except insofar as you buy full packs to participate, rather than individual pieces.
Further, at the current time iRacing are the only ones who charge a subscription. You can do organized online racing on most of the others without paying for servers. It's irrelevant to this issue.
What are the objectives for the CS? Well, its to provide a place for their players to all compete. If the goal is to grow this as large as you can (and why wouldn't it be), doubling down on feature limitations isn't the way to do it. S397 is best known for its endurance sportscar racing. But IndyCar is an important and brand new avenue to explore, and I don't see a reason why you wouldn't want to make its start in life as successful as possible. The CS have been pretty much a failure since its debut. Not only does it have the very severe limitations outlined above, they continue to make bad choices about the structure of the competitions they put up. That might have been OK when it was part of an alpha test to even get something at all to work, but it isn't when you are trying to grow it. Eventually they have come to the realization that the iRacing dev model of quarterly releases is better than any other, after fighting it. Now, they realize the CS system is best with quarterly seasons with weekly rotating series, if you want to build a committed base. The types we've seen - rotating tracks each day with a series lasting a week, etc. etc. - work to test a capability. But you don't build a committed audience with it. It's an arrive-and-drive crashfest, random racing without really any structure. So now you decide you do want a structure. But then, you repeat the errors you already made before. It also still lacks features for matchmaking, like ratings. And ability to look up results.
If you want to be successful, you need to analyze whether the tactical decisions you are making best position yourselves to maximize success. You're not doing that. You're also not fixing the underlying fundamental problems your software has, that none of your comeptitors have. There's multi-million dollar investors watching now.
