With iRacing's reticence to introduce new sports cars, I am worried the sim will eventually not be a great platform for leagues like the one I am part of. They have one TCR car coming; the Corvette GTE will never happen; the Aston Martin GTE is not on the radar, and the GT3 was abandoned; and with BMW leaving WEC and Ford apparently shifting to prototypes it has me legitimately questioning the future of sportscar racing on the sim. Even the prototypes are limited to two of the WEC entries, and at this point the IMSA partnership seems to merely only be a way for iRacing to use the sanctioning body's name to advance their brand.
I just don't have a good feeling about iRacing's position on sportscar racing right now - it seems to be a complete afterthought. They are being vastly outpaced in this regard by Assetto Corsa and Project Cars, among others - maybe iRacing's content is more accurate with a slightly more realistic driving engine, but at what point do we say that we're going to continue to push forward with the old Mustang and a limited selection of out of date GT cars instead of look for other options to keep our mission current? Our league has an actual title sponsor - how do we successfully promote that brand in the modern era of eSports without reasonably current content? Do we move to a platform where we can actually race GT4 against TCR? Where we can race the Lamborghini, Bentley, Porsche, Lexus, Acura, and Aston GT3 cars against the Merc, Audi, and Ferrari? Why does iRacing have 10 Porsches, yet won't do the GT3 R version? Why is there no movement on updating the most popular sportscar on the service, the Global Mazda MX-5, to the new ND-2 spec? For crying out loud, they could just modify the code to accomplish such a minor change - but nothing!
I have never raced any other sim at this level, so I have no axe to grind against iRacing as a sim. I just feel there's going to come a tipping point where if they don't change how they handle updates and licensing they will be left behind, forever competing with out of date cars on out of date tracks while other sims gain more and more of the eSports market share. I also feel there's no real way to address this, as iRacing rarely responds to such lines of questioning - so their stance is completely obfuscated while 300,000 racers worldwide continue paying their fees.
I'm just aggravated, and thinking ahead - wondering at the future of sim racing, and if iRacing will truly ever be more than a NASCAR platform or will they become to sim racing what NR2K3 has become to iRacing. I sincerely hope that once they're done making the core improvements they are working on - damage model, tire model, more classes on track, environment - that they take a hard look at how to improve content updates beyond their oval cars.
I just don't have a good feeling about iRacing's position on sportscar racing right now - it seems to be a complete afterthought. They are being vastly outpaced in this regard by Assetto Corsa and Project Cars, among others - maybe iRacing's content is more accurate with a slightly more realistic driving engine, but at what point do we say that we're going to continue to push forward with the old Mustang and a limited selection of out of date GT cars instead of look for other options to keep our mission current? Our league has an actual title sponsor - how do we successfully promote that brand in the modern era of eSports without reasonably current content? Do we move to a platform where we can actually race GT4 against TCR? Where we can race the Lamborghini, Bentley, Porsche, Lexus, Acura, and Aston GT3 cars against the Merc, Audi, and Ferrari? Why does iRacing have 10 Porsches, yet won't do the GT3 R version? Why is there no movement on updating the most popular sportscar on the service, the Global Mazda MX-5, to the new ND-2 spec? For crying out loud, they could just modify the code to accomplish such a minor change - but nothing!
I have never raced any other sim at this level, so I have no axe to grind against iRacing as a sim. I just feel there's going to come a tipping point where if they don't change how they handle updates and licensing they will be left behind, forever competing with out of date cars on out of date tracks while other sims gain more and more of the eSports market share. I also feel there's no real way to address this, as iRacing rarely responds to such lines of questioning - so their stance is completely obfuscated while 300,000 racers worldwide continue paying their fees.
I'm just aggravated, and thinking ahead - wondering at the future of sim racing, and if iRacing will truly ever be more than a NASCAR platform or will they become to sim racing what NR2K3 has become to iRacing. I sincerely hope that once they're done making the core improvements they are working on - damage model, tire model, more classes on track, environment - that they take a hard look at how to improve content updates beyond their oval cars.
R iRacing is great at the moment. It may be about to get better. But it's not the only shark at the picnic and ACC has just dumped chum in the pond.
