It sure looks more than just "they are in stealth mode". Sometimes they don't even post the most important information about the development of the game: new content releases and patchnotes.
To be fair they do get online each day. Problem is the lack of announcements/news/development planning. We in the dark and that has turned this forum into a ghost town. Hopefully they do make up for this silence with the much anticipated December update.
Lol you got me there. Looks like its been delayed and will be a packaged release with the DTM 2021 cars when that competition is over.
You forgot to say some of the DTM cars, they won't bother to licence all of them! When you say delayed, do you mean kidnapped? Was announced in September.
Munich 23 December 2021 – A little less than one hundred days prior to the first test session at Hockenheim, the DTM schedule for the year 2022 has been finalised. The event so far listed as ‘TBA’ on the calendar for 3-5 June 2022 will not be held. As a result, the 2022 DTM season will run from May until October in five different countries and at eight different race tracks in Germany and other European countries, including six Formula 1 tracks. With the final publication of the new race schedule, ITR is also announcing the early termination of the contract with LDP International b.v., the promoter of the races at the TT-Circuit Assen in The Netherlands since 2019. Promoter Lee van Dam expresses his thanks to the fans: "After three years of hard work together with ITR, we have decided not to continue our contract for the near future. What a bunch of assen. At least it can still fit in the 2021 set but this might explain the delay in release.
The race was on the 2021 calendar so it could still be valid but we don´t know who licences what and under which conditions. If Assen circuit are now not part of DTM then RRE would have to negotiate with them directly - maybe they already did and the reason for the delay is different. Since there are no cars from certain DTM teams in the online leaderboard my guess is that the agreements are individual and not with DTM owners. I´d be interested to know how licensing for old closed circuits, defunct brands with no current owner and street circuits works. Are Rouen, Valencia street circuit and Delorean free-for-alls?
Unfortunately a lot of defunct brands are still having name right holders (don't know if it's the proper way to say it in English). So even if a brand is defunct, more often than not licensing fees are still involved. For street circuits there is a work around. For example rF2: they didn't name Monaco GP circuit just Monaco because of licensing issues. Another thing which could stand in the way for street tracks are buildings. Sometimes buildings need to be licensed too. Strange but true.
What worries me most is in my decades of gaming I have not seen a developer/publisher go this quiet for so long and deliver in the end. It always goes bad. Its is not to say they not working hard behind the scenes but the lack of communication is bad business practice. Hopefully when they do reveal developments I can look back and say it was worth the silence.
To be fair, the only thing they have said they would deliver and haven´t yet is one track. It´s also true that taking 1 minute to communicate the release date or that there is a further delay would not be unreasonable. There are plenty of publishers/developers who overhype things and also fail to delivery in a timely manner or indeed at all - not naming any names, I am sure you can think of a couple of abandoned projects or "3". We are indeed spoilt for choice in terms of racing games so anyone wanting dynamic weather and track conditions, multicore optimisations, cars and tracks not in this game or a guaranteed price for current and future content has a number of other options to choose from.