Recurring fees and online features offered by ISI

The 'beauty' of the $12.99 per year for simracers is that the cost represents less than 1/3 of the full game price for essentially continued development. The added bonus is that you get a sim with continues to evolve over time... as opposed to being scrapped every year.
For ISI, they get to make a product which will continue to draw new interest and purchasers over a much longer period. It also becomes less of a gamble as with that increase and user feedback, they can accurately 'forecast' when it's time to move forward to new products.
I know guys who have purchased the original rfactor as recently as four months ago.
This is what happens when a company puts out a great product. Sales can go on for years.
It's the 'fly-by-night' guys who have to develop a new game every year in hopes of 'raking' in as much cash, as fast as possible before folks lose interest.
We all know who they are.
Great sims sell themselves over time.
Heck! GPL thought us that. It's still selling based on independent mods...not even official ones.

 

Richard Burns Rally is selling pretty good too, considering how old and "outdated" it is nowadays It's a shame some companies take the easy way out and do **** every year when they could achieve so much more by doing one great game that would sell even on year 2020.
All I wish is a proper rally sim ;__;

 

We get steady sales of rF1 every day, but rF1 also had a post-release development period of 3 years (originally released in 2005, last update was in 2008) with NO extra payments. These extra releases extended the lifetime a bit, as did the features added afterwards.

We want to do the same with rF2, but we want to do more of it. The yearly payments effectively just bump you up to the product lifetime purchase price ($84) over a longer period, but there should be no doubt about the fact that ISI don't just pump out a product and let it go. Most of the rF1 tracks were NOT in the original release, they came later.