Why does nobody try compete with iracing?

I'm sure most you know what a phenomenal success IRacing is, because although in my opinion the driving is less realistic / enjoyable than other sims, the multiplayer service is almost perfect.

If I was developer of Assetto Corsa, Stock Car Extreme, Rfactor2 and RRE, I would be thinking 'hmm so Iracing has a sim that I don't think drives as well as mine and most people will spend anywhere from the same amount up to 20 times as much to play it. Imagine how they'll come flocking to us if we offer a similar online experience!'

No doubt it is not an easy task to make an online service as good as IRacing, but there is already a modder in AC busy making a similar thing just in his spare time, so it cant be that hard. I just don't get why nobody is trying to compete with this phenomenally successful business model.

 

The prime reason is 80-90% of sim racers don't race on-line.

So while iRacing have grown to dominate the on-line side, they still only have 60,000 members after many years on sale compared to ACs 250,000 sales and pCARS 1.5 million sales.

 

And iracing had some rich guy backing them.

 

Do you want AC to be pay to play?

 

The iRacing devs have John Henry's millions backing them. Its a different situation than the one developers normally find themselves in.

Is iRacing a "huge" success really? Has it turned a profit yet???

 

That's a bit disrespectful is it not?
Why don't you create your own game with all the things you want in it. A dozen or so Italian guys did it so it can't be that hard.

 

Hehe, well thats a totally new view and never has been discussed in this Forums

 

That is a good question. Probably not the right place to do it, as you can see by the answers you already got.

I think there is one point that may detract Devs from doing it. How do you make people leave the service they invested so much in?
Look at the Moba market. So many clones of LoL and Dota, and yet, only a few have a tiny fraction of the success this 2 have. Most are condemned to shut down at birth already.

For a person that spent 100 or 200 euros in iRacing, what justifies leaving that for a new game/service, where they have to start spending the same amount? Is the different physics enough? Don't think so.

 

obviously because it's not this phenomenally successful business model

 

Not sure why you think that's disrespectful, I'm not saying what the AC team do is easy. Just making the point that if implementing a similar service would mean the whole team working on it for 1 year +, then that's a big decision since you are taking away from your time to work on new dlc, game improvements, sequels etc. But, and this is just speculation, perhaps that kind of time is not necessary seeing as someone is already making something similar in his spare time.

I didn't know those sales numbers Dave quoted above, so obviously it makes sense to go the route of the greatest profit. I didn't know the differences were that big.

 

To be fair, because iRacing is very expensive and includes a subscription element, sales numbers are not the be all and end all. An iRacing member will pay iRacing far more than an AC member will pay Kunos even if they buy all the DLC, so in terms of income things will be much closer.

 

Yeh you're right, as this would be a very difficult decision for me as I'm about $300 in to Iracing so far, so to spend an extra $x annually on 'Assetto premium' service or whatever they'd call it would be difficult. However since there is already a very healthy AC online population, many of them would likely make the change. This in turn would likely be met with howls of protest since it would be splitting the community.

Perhaps the best people to try something like this would be rfactor 2, since they already charge people to play their joke 'online service'. Um what service would that be? A room full of empty community servers? So if they revamped the entire thing , implemented safety rating, performance rating, scheduled races etc and upped their annual fee, they might actually succeed. No doubt it would be small to begin with, but if most people enjoy the driving experience more than Iracing's, then perhaps over time people would start 'upgrading', like we do with all other material things in life. If a new graphics card offers a better playing experience, many people will get it despite having 'invested' $x on their previous card a few years back.

 

I wouldn't be opposed to a premium Assetto Corsa service. I don't know how much use I'd get out of it though. The whole online competitive, ranked system is actually a huge part of what turns me off iRacing. If I get a months subscription I'd be afraid I might only use a few hours of it, I'd be worried that I'm getting in peoples way and causing rage in the better drivers around me. iRacing seems like serious business and all I want is entertainment.

 

Reason #1, of a longer list, that I don´t play iRacing.

 

I’d say there are more people who just want to hop in some public MP races from time to time, so why should a dev bother with building a complicated ranking- and safetyrating system? Because I think it is hard to implement and get it to work. I’m an iracing customer myself and I love their system because it creates more or less clean and fair racing and makes it more serious imo. But you have to keep in mind that our hobby is a niche and ca 50.000 iracing-customers is not much and further on they have to pay a monthly fee to use this service. Finally there is money in the background, as someone already said.

 

I think the high price of iracing makes the online experience the way it is. If you pay much money on one car model, you know why you do it. Because you want to drive this car till perfection. Then there is the rating system. You´ll drive more carefully when you know you paid lots of money and want to participate on the races you want. And don´t want to get downrated. So I think it´s depending on eachother. This means to get only good drivers on your servers you have to make it exclusiv. Exclusiv means you have to put high prices on it, so you have to think twice to spend that money. But this concept excludes modding. Because it doesn´t make sense to buy expensive cars, if you can get them for free. So the main reason, why these titles can´t compete is because they have complete differen concepts. And a mixture of both won´t work. And I´m really happy AC isn´t like iracing.

 

Iracing also uses scheduled races. Users there know that each half or each hour a race will start, for example at 17:00, and other server at 17:30. So people will converge on that specific race, filling it. Correct that info if you know more, I haven't raced online in iracing.

But lets say we have 10 rackservice servers that are maintained by them+kunos. These could be in a way that every hour a new race will start. So schedule the practice/qualify+overtime for a race to start each hour. Then put a couple servers just with the popular content, to satisfy people that want to race with that. And other servers start with half an hour gap to the other group.

- For me, the benefit of a scheduled race against a random time is that for example: I open AC, go to Online menu and look for something to race. Then I see several servers already in Race mode, others with 15min of practice or qualify, but I just wanted to race straight away. So if I knew that each hour a certain server with the content I like will start its Race, I and possibly others would converge there at the same time to have a race. But instead everyone goes online for multiplayer whenever, but with scheduled race people will converge to the same hour. These remain public races, but at least people would know that a race will start every hour. There can also be shorter races every half an hour, without practice/qualify time, but we'd know if we want to race now, a quick race will start every half an hour, or every hour.

 

From a competitive point of view, for sure it is. Almost all competitive simracers are there, and I'm not only talking about the aliens.

 

This.

If you're interested in (highly)competitive racing, there isn't really any other alternative. A couple leagues scattered here and there in other sims might have some very good drivers, but nothing close to the depth you'd find in proper iRacing fields.