I don't know about best SIM ever but certainly having a multiplayer system that is usable and a UI that works better has helped. Just makes you wonder why they couldn't have done this 10 years ago. Where would they be now if they had etc.
In other news, Motorsport Games delayed their 3rd quarter report and have completed the share swap whereby the share value has multiplied by ten as the number of shares has been reduced. This allows them to stay on the US stock exchange in terms of being worth more than a dollar but now they don´t meet the minmum 500k shares in the company requirement.
It would appear developers don't have much love for multiplayer. Raceroom tried but never developed the idea ...a once in a lifetime thing that is now dying due to lack of vision. Sector3's latest gamble is trucks. Great for those that love trucks I am sure. Meanwhile LFM is cleaning up and good for them to, even if their service asks for a very small price I will sign up.
Neither for multiplayer, nor for single player. Most of them think putting a few nice cars on a nice track and letting them race there is enough to become a successful simracing game. iRacing, LFM and F1 games are putting them to shame. Assetto Corsa would have been forgotten already if not for mods, some of them truly transforming. Raceroom is doing a decent job with their ranked racing, but barely anything more, while it suffers from other shortcomings, mostly on the superficial side (which is not insignificant). All in all, simracing games are bad games, for the most part. That's why most of them need some third party solutions to gain any traction.
I view LFM as a natural progression. A one-stop shop that will cater for everyone. That is not to say I will celebrate the passing of Raceroom. But I think I am witnessing exactly that. Sometimes history is ready for a change. I support LFM.
The full picture shows that RRE has regressed to pre COVID levels of users whereas both the Kunos games (2k for ACC and 6k for AC) and Beam NG (15k) have made massive gains and Rfactor 2 and AMS2 have seen modest increases.
That's a weird "full" picture when you compare it to AC and BeamNG, which are by no means a direct competition used mainly for competitive racing, but are used as realistic car games to mess around instead, having much broader appeal. You might've brought up truck simulators there just as well. In the realm of pure racing sims it's only ACC that have made any significant gains, but they went into lockdown peroid with a pretty dominant position and increasing traction already, so no surprise. Raceroom admittedly suffered a noticeable outflux of players lately, but predicting the game's death based on it is pretty bold considering it survived years with less players. One change can turn around a "dead" game anyway, and - to stay on topic - rFactor 2 is a good example of that.
Those metrics look good, but I was really talking about competitive ranked servers. Last night, there were just a couple of dozen people playing Raceroom. Indeed, Rfactor2 has had a resurgence, so anything is possible, but I think sector3 failed to capitalize on the momentum they built. Graphically speaking Raceroom is looking quite dated, after playing Rfactor2 it took me a few minutes to reacclimatize to Raceroom, this I believe is also a contributing factor - not that graphics matter a lot in a Sim but immersion sort of matters. I want Raceroom to succeed but things look grim for now. As for Rfactor2, all it ever needed was a decent easy to access iRacing type system which LFM seem to be providing and for Sim racers that surely is a win?
My intention was to comment that RRE´s own figures are downward trending overall and the graph being cut off in May didn´t show that. I tried RF2 but don´t feel it has the right ingredients for me and I actually find the graphics quite cartoony. Beam NG is an example of a game that shouldn´t be popular but has evolved into something massive thanks to word of mouth and constant development rather than coming from an established studio with lots of marketing budget and official licences. Perhaps the fact it´s the only one that doesn´t nickel and dime people with endless paid DLC and has a reasonable base price could be factors?
Fair enough, but as I mentioned, that outflux was insignificant regarding whether the game is dying or not, which is the discussed topic. I'll still insist that BeamNG is too different of a game to take anything it does as directly indicative towards racing focused sims like rF2 or R3E. For example, it's much easier to turn profit and invest it back into development when you don't have license costs to recoup. But try to market unlicensed cars and fictional tracks, especially the latter ones, to simracing community, good luck. We have a tiny taste of that in Raceroom.
I don't really like sunny weather graphics in rF2, it kind of shows its age when it comes to direct lighting and sharp shadows. But it looks great and pretty realistic (definitely compared to R3E) in cloudy/overcast weather. The rain weather also looks decent.
They all are, except AC, and I don't know the numbers for iRacing. So it's not like Raceroom is doing bad. What outflux you're talking about? There were influxes in January and May and numbers returned to where they were, plus a downward trend. "People are leaving" is not the same as "people came but didn't stay". What happened was the latter, not the former.
That´s not what I see when I plot the last 3 years. ACC, RF2 and RRE all started with similar player counts. RRE was clearly ahead of RF2 until the UI update the latter had earlier this year and is the only one to have the same or less players now than in 2019 despite being the only free to play one so we agree that player retention is an issue.
And a zoom of the last 12 months for better clarity. We can see peaks for RRE during the summer try everything for free period and those of RF2 and AMS2 when the major game updates dropped.
I like how LFM have adopted the iRacing system in rankings. Raceroom's numbering system doesn't quite have the same pull. I suspect player participation in rFactor2 will grow quite dramatically in the next few months.
Whichever way you look.at it the numbers playing raceroom aren't great. And there's no sign of them going up for any reason. I think we are in a period of steady decline tbh. New content now and again won't make much difference.
Still hoping, this will come true. Give it a go and and please no umpteenth rehash of the same series with new liveries. I do not want to talk RR bad, in fact I would like to get back in the car and enjoy driving again.