Haha I love that especially in an article that starts off referring to iRacing as a "humdrum game for the well off".

I personally like rF and iRacing and don't mind paying for the value of continued development and quality of racing competition, but I wonder how this will sit with those that write off iRacing (unfairly IMHO) solely because of having to pay.

Some of us can't justify the cost. It's not about being angry that iRacing costs money. It's that I can't work it into an already stretched budget.

Yep, gaming used to be cheap entertainment. A solid simulation, flight naval or racing would keep you going for 100 hours and more for little initial price. These days it seems they have realized that they can't forever charge 50 bucks for a title that is getting a few months old, so instead of making their money on the initial price they want to make money on "services". With the convenient secondary effect that they can use these "services" to market to their customers or sell customer data to third parties.

No worries Lugnut, I understand especially now that times are tough, I unsubbed from iRacing for some time myself, it just seemed in that article like they started out bashing iRacing as something for the "well off" yet later don't seem to notice rF2 may have some similar costs to keep the quality/updates coming... sort of an unprofessional approach for that article IMHO, lots of people enjoy iRacing (and rF) not just because they are well off, but because they feel like they get lots of hours of quality simming and competition from the $8/month fee.

Wrongly or rightly I tend to equate my simming to similar real life hobbies (trackdays, amateur racing, RC racing, flight lessons), so other enthusiast activities I have seriously considered or done in the past that cost real money, so when it comes to paying costs for similar "virtual" quality activities like iRacing or FSX add-ons or Dirt3 DLC, I consider/evaluate them based on quality and value to me of the experience, and not necessarily how much I paid for GPL or GTL or rFactor or Falcon4 years ago and how much fun I got out of those $40 with mods people put thousands of hours into, but overall I still need to have the budget for it and if there's no budget, it's out of consideration (too bad as I really want a TM Warthog HOTAS and a Fanatec CSR ELITE)

Looking forward to rF2 though, I'll be one of those hopefully buying into the open-beta if it's similar DCS A-10C.

I imagine with the uproar that the "free for 12 months then....." comment has caused across many sim racing/gaming forums, Tim Wheatly will be posting some more information soon for clarification.

I too would buy rF2 if it's an open-beta like DCS A-10 was....ISI's been great with their support and development over the years as far as I'm concerned and I have no problem at all supporting them, using their past track record as a reference....unlike other racing game companies I will refrain from mentioning here....coughCodeMasterscough

I'll second Lugs statement... If I could justify the cost I'd be there... But there's no justification atm... When all online play goes that way we'll I'll have a reason to justify it.. But for now it's easily squashed.

I'll wait for clarification, but I'm putting this as another big checkmark in the "negatives" column. No DX11 but they want continued paying? For what? An already dated engine that won't get updated?



The Jedi Master

cool! bookmarked for reading!

I never heard of this Simracing magazine. I see rFactor website in the header so I assume it is a rFactor house organ?

this!

I must confess that until this year I was stuck on this mentality that games must be cheap or I will not buy or subscribe to them. After getting over this and joining iRacing I was completely sold on their business that allows me to have extremely clean pickup racing any day of the week!

I think iRacing could grab more customers if they had some kind of racing series package deals? All the cars and tracks needed for a specific series + a year subscription. oh well, I guess they probably already thought of this idea but found out it was not a viable business model?

good points.

Has anyone seen any info on the sub pricing? I scanned the article just now but could not find any info about sub pricing.