Managing Director Marcel Offermans Leaves Studio 397

trichens said:

I'd like to say that in now 12 pages of coments, a thread about Marcel Offermans leaving S397/MSG consists mainly of complaints about the cost of DLC, the underlying code base, how AI is (or isn't) working, and loads of other c**p that has absolutely nothing to do with the topic.

People may not like rF2 and that's their choice but I'm guessing that anyone leaving a firm would be pretty diappointed to get a card from co-workers and customers whinging about the products their company created.

I wish all the best for Marcel - and I'd imagine that he's probably happy to be rid of this carping on and on and on - I know I would.

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Curious how long your comment will stay though, before being removed as off-topic.

R.Man said:

Yes i'm guilty too...

Sim racing is a young industry. What we are witnessing now is not something exceptional, it's just how the community work after some stimuli and some years. The community is showing its character or its personnality. One positive thing that we may get from these is the opportunity for the actual remaining sim studio and the future studios to understand the limits of the community and they should avoid to push some boundaries.

All they have to do is listen smartly to the community. It's a community of grown men so usually VERY patient but VERY agressive once the limit is reached. It start from a whisper and usually end up with a scream if not correctly managed. It's simple and difficult at the same time. The consequence of not listening the community is that it's going to start scream at the studios one day or an another. And whatever the studio may say or do from this point nothing is going to change. A screaming person don't listen and don't look also. In sum the studios have to adapt to the community not the inverse.

S397 may have frustrated more people than they think along the past years in a higher degree than they estimated it. They have paid the sour price. It's not S397 only, Reiza gone through it with AMS2, SMS with PC3 and bit of PC2, Motorsport Games with Nascar 21.

I don't agree with people that in one way or another say that they've lost faith in the sim racing community, or people that say tha RD community is toxic etc. The community is not toxic , It's even among the best digital community ever, it just has its limits of tolerance.

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I think the sim racing community needs to relax a bit. Instead of being glad that we have such a huge amount of options available the main vibe is allways negativity and how we can spot shortcommings here or there. And if you tell someone that you can still have fun with sim XYZ if you do this or that - wich I consider as help or giving a nice advice and wich is most of the time a five minute job - it allways get's whiped away with: a user shouldn't have to do that and that people giving the advice are fanboys. How dumb have we become? And the best part is when people tell that rF2 is dead, while there are still quite a few people enjoying their time with it along with other products on the market.

As allready pointed out, rF2 the last moddable sim that is still in development wich offers such a vast experience and complexity that bugs or issues are easier to happen than in more streamlined games. And as long as there isn't an alternative available (still waiting for AC2 and Rennsport) I see no reason why I should stop playing this beautiful product with it's great fidelity. And it would be nice if some individuals simply respected this without telling me the usual fanboy blabla. The moment you take a ride on the newest tracks from people like SVictor with his nice conversions of old GPL masterpieces you instantly forget to think about how old rF2's codebase is because it's simply engaging. What else do you want to have as a virtual petrolhead?

Tim Wheatley's sim racing news site doesn't allow comments. It's a thing of beauty.
He's even trying to arrange an interview with Marcel soon.
Screw this place, man.

gianlucaP said:

You said it's the new RF2, right?
You might need to check again what RF2 is. Modding is a part of the game, comes with the game, Just like in AC. Full support from the developer to modding.
In AMS2 you can change car skins. That's it.

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theres some few modded cars actually

tr1v1um said:

And if you tell someone that you can still have fun with sim XYZ if you do this or that - wich I consider as help or giving a nice advice and wich is most of the time a five minute job - it allways get's whiped away with: a user shouldn't have to do that and that people giving the advice are fanboys.

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What i've observed is there are some patterns so we may need to consider things case by case. It's up to the studios to finds the most handicapping issues and fix them in advance. You said it's a matter of 5mn tweak, yes I agree but some sim ask way more than that.

- generally people don't like tweaking a non moddable sim for example AMS2,PC2, RRRE, iRacing. Most of responsibility is endorsed by the studio. It has to make it work well. That's why people suggesting things often get negative responses even if they have good intentions. Insisting is even worse as at some extend it's like insulting the players intelligence. Players consider themselves as customers .

- people enjoy tweaking when the sim is designed to be tweaked for example AC, Beam NG,etc. Responsibility is shared between the studio and the players. Players are not just customers. That's why taking AC as reference is irrelevant when we say "in AC players have to do much tweaking why don't they want to do so in AMS2" . AC is a "LEGO" sim, AMS2 is a premade toy sim. We buy a premade toy sim when we need instant enjoyment.

- people need a non modable game to work out of the box for example ACC, AMS2. Few clicks and you're on the track and enjoy it. ACC was under fire after release because of that. Also AMS2 for example worked out of the box in term of UI but the handling needed lot of setups to work until the latest versions , just to work, that's why It has been under fire for almost 2 years.

- people like tweaking modable sims if the tweaking is easy. In this example RF2 is very hard to tweak as it's mainly based on *.ini file editing and sometimes ( most of the time) it doesn't work . It also requires game restart and RF2 start is very slow. So when you say do this and that to a RF2 player who is struggling to make it work, you may face some backfire. RF2 has a lot of parameters that should have been exposed in the graphic UI and without the need of sim restart.

- people HATE sim crash on start. RF2 has a lot of this for years and until now. RRRE has lot of this also. It may be related to the engine being too old so very sensitive to OS change etc.

- many of a given sim haters was previously a great fan of it. They just somewhat feel betrayed for a reasons or an another. So saying "you don't know the sim that's why you don't like it" is often irrelevant .

- UPDATE: People don't like when steam workshop unsubsribe to their content then suddenly subscribe to all the s397 content and make the sim redownload almost Gb of files. That's a RF2 specific issue that is still here until now

- Most of sim devs don't know how to communicate to the players that's why there is often conflict between them. Very few sim studio hire communication specialists to fulfill it. In general even out of the scope of sim racing, devs also known to be proud and often a bit arrogant.

Those are just some examples of scenarios. The community negative reactions are not just tantrums, they are baked by very logic reasons that we need to study, classify and use.

gianlucaP said:

Hey Austin, can you now explain us how you got hired and why by Ian Bell?
This will help to clarify the possible misinformation that I made when I claimed that you were in reality bought off with peanuts and WMD stickers in order to make you stop insulting Mr Bell and his team, and not hired because you had some professional skill useful for the development of a racing videogame.

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It's not even that interesting of a story.

Hired as a QA guy because I was spotting issues and reporting them in detail on my blog that the QA team just... wasn't. QA is just writing detailed bug reports and being passionate about games. It is an entry level job in which no prior industry experience is needed.

When I joined SMS in 2017, the head of their QA team was a guy that worked on... the Lego games. He was a great mentor but he wasn't a sim racer and there were things he just... didn't know were issues. They needed a sim racer who could write well and break the games. They realistically could have hired anyone in this thread who spoke english as a first language, but I was the guy motivated enough to have a blog and write 4500 word articles every couple of days about why pCars ruined my life so they went with the guy who had a writing ability.

He liked the site and encouraged me to keep **** talking SMS even as I worked for them, because he grew up in Ireland during their civil war. He watched how ugly their media became during the war and thought it was cool someone was old school and talked mad s**t on his blog.

I never had instructions to go soft on SMS. Only to go soft on iRacing, because iRacing kept making legal threats. iRacing is insane and as we saw during the lockdowns, will threaten actual IndyCar drivers if they don't praise the game in interviews, so this is par for the course for their behavior anyways.

ì

R.Man said:

I agree about RF2 , AMS2 is a menace for it and both almost sell the same content C8R, etc. As I said earlier both have similarities so may share the same market target and fanbase. BUT AMS2 has nothing to be proud about that, RF2 10 years old was already in weak position few years before AMS2 2 years old was released. AMS2 has just done better than the 6 th student in class out of 10 students if we consider 7th RF2, 8th AMS1, 9th LFS, 10th RF1...
What I find funny is why would AMS2 be a menace for ACC with it's few outdated GT3 and Gt4 cars? And it's controversial physic and handling...And if you VERIFY chronogically all the discussions about AMS2 on Reiza forums, here in RD, on Youtube etc, AMS2 fanboys are always the first to mention and criticize ACC or RF2 or any other sim before people come and ripost.
AMS2 fans will always say that steam chart or any Youtube review is not valid ...if they are favorable to AMS2. But I don't care I just would like to ask, where in this graph unless you are drunk of optimism AMS2 was or is a menace for ACC?

STEAM CHART ACC vs AMS2

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Not sure why they would feel that way can't answer for them, but people like you that keep trying to bring forward this silly narrative are the proof that there are so many who feel the need to take a poke at another sim rather than discussing about the matters at hand. If AMS2 is so irrelevant why constantly bringing it into the conversation? AMS2 by the way doesn't look like something that wants to sell the same product as ACC since ACC is only focused on one content and limited venues, so again not sure why ACC fanboys like you feel under siege and come here to measure their .d....


Anyway, back to the current topic of MSG and RF2s future: the challenge is to find a reason why someone who has money would have to buy into a product that is almost 10 years old, it's posting a loss of almost $600k over revenues of around $900k, has a limited market penetration despite being probably the most known product in the market and having already cranked to 11 the level of advertising, presence on socials and newspapers and even focused sites, officially endorsed events and counting on several very well known testimonials.
A product that does not have anymore a technical edge over competitors as there are other products that do similar things some times better or have more advanced features altogether.
If someone is looking for an investor from the gaming market these are points they will consider carefully.
If the aim is to find a speculative investor from outside, a maverick of sort, then flip side of the coin is that he will be looking for the quick buck and likely won't be in for the long haul.
In the current simracing market there aren't really actors that can easily put on the table the many millions needed to pay back Luminis and invest on the title.

R.Man said:

What i've observed is there are some patterns so we may need to consider things case by case. It's up to the studios to finds the most handicapping issues and fix them in advance. You said it's a matter of 5mn tweak, yes I agree but some sim ask way more than that.

- generally people don't like tweaking a non moddable sim for example AMS2,PC2, RRRE, iRacing. Most of responsibility is endorsed by the studio. It has to make it work well. That's why people suggesting things often get negative responses even if they have good intentions. Insisting is even worse as at some extend it's like insulting the players intelligence. Players consider themselves as customers .

- people enjoy tweaking when the sim is designed to be tweaked for example AC, Beam NG,etc. Responsibility is shared between the studio and the players. Players are not just customers. That's why taking AC as reference is irrelevant when we say "in AC players have to do much tweaking why don't they want to do so in AMS2" . AC is a "LEGO" sim, AMS2 is a premade toy sim. We buy a premade toy sim when we need instant enjoyment.

- people need a non modable game to work out of the box for example ACC, AMS2. Few clicks and you're on the track and enjoy it. ACC was under fire after release because of that. Also AMS2 for example worked out of the box in term of UI but the handling needed lot of setups to work until the latest versions , just to work, that's why It has been under fire for almost 2 years.

- people like tweaking modable sims if the tweaking is easy. In this example RF2 is very hard to tweak as it's mainly based on *.ini file editing and sometimes ( most of the time) it doesn't work . It also requires game restart and RF2 start is very slow. So when you say do this and that to a RF2 player who is struggling to make it work, you may face some backfire. RF2 has a lot of parameters that should have been exposed in the graphic UI and without the need of sim restart.

- people HATE sim crash on start. RF2 has a lot of this for years and until now. RRRE has lot of this also. It may be related to the engine being too old so very sensitive to OS change etc.

- many of a given sim haters was previously a great fan of it. They just somewhat feel betrayed for a reasons or an another. So saying "you don't know the sim that's why you don't like it" is often irrelevant .

- Most of sim devs don't know how to communicate to the players that's why there is often conflict between them. Very few sim studio hire communication specialists to fulfill it. In general even out of the scope of sim racing, devs also known to be proud and often a bit arrogant.

Those are just some examples of scenarios. The community negative reactions are not just tantrums, they are baked by very logic reasons that we need to study, classify and use.

Click to expand...

Once again, I think you have a few fair points and I think there is a certain point when tweaking can become frustrating especialy when you aren't used to it. But I doubt - or actually I know it that rF2 will not require any more tweaking in ini files than a comparable sim like AC. If you edit a json file or an ini file doesn't matter and I haven't done anymore ini-file tweaking in rF2 than in AC. I have no idea from where people are taking this myth from but you can do most if not all of the basic stuff from within the UI and alot of the stuff, even the usage of mods is highly automated and part of the game. Actually I have done more ini file tweaking in AC than in rF2 the last couple of months while having considerably more hours on rF2. I even use the basic AI settings - 100 % difficulty, 5 % Limiter and depending on the car between 5 and 25 % aggression. Some people get so obsessed with this stuff that they miss the whole picture. You can't drive historic Monaco with 50 % agression.

People need to get rid of the mindset that you are forced to tweak and I somehow have the feeling that it does more harm than any good. I mean, I have no issue with it and I enjoy it to tinker a bit with files from time to time. But it's pretty clear that rF2 is not designed to be streamlined experiences and never will be.

Marcel allways pointed at 3rd party solutions when asked for certain features that people would like to see integrated into the game, wich at times felt a bit lazy. But it's also obvious where he is coming from and that he tried to encourage the community to build plugins and tools to expand the sim as they see it fitting wich is actually the whole point of rF games: customize, control, connect. And it's great to see that the concept still works eventhough it gets a bit out of fashion with everything getting faster and faster.

gianlucaP said:

What are inventing man? You closed your blog as soon as Ian hired you. He didn't invited you to keep up with it. You were offered a job as a tester and a sponsor for your racing in circle hobby.
And I was in the WMD both for the first and the second game. Claiming that you were hired, because he needed a guy like you, it's an insult to Tom and the other devs that were in charge of the testing aspect. You're pathetic.

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Hired early 2017.
Blog closed December 2017.
It was legal threats from iRacing that SMS were getting annoyed at.
In particular I showcased their rallycross car traction rolling, on launch day.
Guy named Dan Roeper gave me his login creds, I bombed around for 20 mins, figured out you could roll the car on command lol.
Phoenix turn 1 and Daytona turn 1 were the easiest spots.
iRacing got big mad despite posting all over social media how it was the most people on iRacing EVER that day.
They should have been celebrating.
In reality they were rallying the lawyers. Looking back it was kind of hilarious.
Massively insecure about their product.

The Toms told me directly they didn't have experience with racing sims and needed someone who did. Work varied from tire compound tests (someone actually has to get in the sim rig and drive full stints on the tire compounds, you know) to little things like discovering half the tracks were missing a flagger in the flag stand. Or that the fuel map toggle in the ICM didn't actually do anything for a few builds.

Sim racing community bitches and moan that SMS never got the little things about their sims right, so they hired someone specifically for that purpose. What exactly is wrong with this? No conspiracy here. If Kunos hired an eSports driver specifically to find setup exploits and other weird gremlins that only the hardcore guys at RD complain about, you'd be celebrating it and praising them as forward-thinking.

The saddest part is that the company then pivoted to release an arcade racer and a movie tie-in game, wasting a lot of my time. There instead should have been a Season 2 of pCars 2 DLC and patches. You would all still be playing it.

And then right as they shifted back to a hardcore sim, they got rid of the guy hired specifically as a sim advisor, because a schizophrenic spammed HR's inbox and EA I guess cannot recognize that maybe a guy babbling on about Psalm 109 and Austin Ogonoski being sent from God to destroy him, might not be mentally stabe.

It's really hilarious.

tr1v1um said:

Once again, I think you have a few fair points and I think there is a certain point when tweaking can become frustrating especialy when you aren't used to it. But I doubt - or actually I know it that rF2 will not require any more tweaking in ini files than a comparable sim like AC. If you edit a json file or an ini file doesn't matter and I haven't done anymore ini-file tweaking in rF2 than in AC. I have no idea from where people are taking this myth from but you can do most if not all of the basic stuff from within the UI and alot of the stuff, even the usage of mods is highly automated and part of the game. Actually I have done more ini file tweaking in AC than in rF2 the last couple of months while having considerably more hours on rF2. I even use the basic AI settings - 100 % difficulty, 5 % Limiter and depending on the car between 5 and 25 % aggression. Some people get so obsessed with this stuff that they miss the whole picture. You can't drive historic Monaco with 50 % agression.

People need to get rid of the mindset that you are forced to tweak and I somehow have the feeling that it does more harm than any good. I mean, I have no issue with it and I enjoy it to tinker a bit with files from time to time. But it's pretty clear that rF2 is not designed to be streamlined experiences and never will be.

Marcel allways pointed at 3rd party solutions when asked for certain features that people would like to see integrated into the game, wich at times felt a bit lazy. But it's also obvious where he is coming from and that he tried to encourage the community to build plugins and tools to expand the sim as they see it fitting wich is actually the whole point of rF games: customize, control, connect. And it's great to see that the concept still works eventhough it gets a bit out of fashion with everything getting faster and faster.

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What I can say from personal experience, is that I usually spend a good bit of time trying to tweak things if out of the gate it does not feel right. I had to do this with practically every sim. Problem is, in most titles I find an improvement straight away. In others, no matter what I touch I cannot get to the bottom of the problem, or if I do find a solution, the end result is still dissapointing.

I played most but not all games/sims. There are 3 of them which I never managed to get them to feel "right" on my personal books: Raceroom, Project Cars 2, rFactor 2.

I spend a lot of time tweaking stuff in Assetto Corsa, but I do it because I know I can get a good outcome out of it. I got tired of looking through files on readme on rFactor 2, and not being able to get an experience I enjoyed out of it. So now instead of actually giving things a personal go, I just go through the release notes of each build published on websites to see if there were meaningful changes to the things I care about. And nope, that has never been the stuff S397 cared about.

Thats bad news, but good luck in the future!

So everyone agrees that rF2 was the greatest thing since garlic bread.
What about some wealthy guy buy the isimotor2.5 engine and start something new?
A rF3 with all that is needed.
Tire model, drivetrain simulation, and that sort.
With a career mode baked into and a online competition mode for a few bugs a month.
And a shiny, yet not cheesy display of being in a racing format.
Would it be possible?

So much melodrama.

Think its about time ISI stormed the fortress and retook their glory with Gmotor3....

Metla said:

So much melodrama.

Think its about time ISI stormed the fortress and retook their glory with Gmotor3....

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This is really not a bad idea.

After what they gave and how they were treated I don't think they would come near sims again, of course that is just feeling. I mean who wouldn't after decades of service

So they banked on updated engine and online being massively more popular and don't forget they cut the price in 1/2 just trying to stay alive but every new article review not some but all bagged it
most times never mentioning tire or physics or dynamics almost like none of them even drove it ! They just concentrated on the ugly never the good and that just dragged them down

The only shining light is the people that are passionate about rF2 have had value and some
I spent more on 3rd party DLC then DLC
All those get nothing but good words, they have stuff all overheads, no offices, no taxes
But you expect owners to have content updated for 10 years and treat them like dirt

Talk about bite the hand that feeds you

gianlucaP said:

What are you inventing man? You closed your blog as soon as Ian hired you. He didn't invited you to keep up with it. You were offered a job as a tester and a sponsor for your racing in circle hobby.
And I was in the WMD both for the first and the second game. Claiming that you were hired, because he needed a guy like you, it's an insult to Tom and the other devs that were in charge of the testing aspect. You're pathetic.

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That's not true.
Austin faced a huge backlash in his comments section from a lot of his fans (myself included) long after he was signed. We constantly attacked every article he wrote that seemed to go easy PC2 when it was clearly deserving of more criticism. This went on for quite a while and spilled over into the comments sections for other sims. The blog actually stayed up for several months detailing his experiences with the real car they'd sponsored for him alongside the usual sim bashing. It was his readership that made him close the blog in the end.

It was like he was a guy that was on our side, dishing out honest reviews and harsh realities on sim racing, something you don't get on sites like this. Then SMS came along and their money changed how PC2 was treated. For me personally, I felt that he'd been bought and paid for by SMS, how could we trust him anymore? They surely read any article on PC2 before it was published and that wasn't fair on other sim makers and the readership who were expecting unbiased honesty.

Austin, PRC was a great blog. My favourite sim racing site in fact. I missed it when it went.