Iracing new membership up 50%

[Kurupt CDN]

I came across this article, apparently since the start of the coronavirus shutdown iracings active user base has jumped from 110,000 to 160,000!

iRacing subscriptions have surged nearly 50% this year

In the wake of COVID-19, sim racing has blown up in a big way. iRacing President and CFO Anthony Gardner tells us that his service is seeing unprecedented growth.

www.cnet.com

I gotta give credit to the iracing staff, they took a bad situation with the Corona virus, used there license partners to put things together in a short period of time and just killed it.

I believe there is 5 pro series currently using the service and streaming on national tv


The part that impresses me is that is 50,000 PC sim racers.
Hopefully that extra increase in cash flow will result in the hiring of more staff and faster development times.

Good times for iracers!

 

[mozzie]

Well, we can definitely see it on the day to day concurrent user numbers. Before COVID-19 I was thinking having 6000 members online was a lot. Last night there were close to 16,000. F3 Sprint race at 21:00 CET split over 7 times!

 

[Kurupt CDN]

Ya it's nice to having lots of people to race with.
For several hrs last night the trucks @ talledega had 10+ splits for several hrs straight.
Mx-5 race today had over 500 signups.

 

[BrunoBæ]

Oh man if they just had a TM I felt comfortable with

Hehe no seriously - when they dropped supporting Win7 they actually did me a favour.
Because from then on I didnt have to be tempted to revisit my membership.

CatsAreTheWorstDogs: Im not so stupid that I dont take it as a good thing they are growing a bit - because their 24/7 service deserves it.

 

[Kurupt CDN]

I am not saying the tire model doesn't have issues but I feel the NTM is a step in the right direction and they seem to be updating the tires per car alot of late and listening and responding to the feedback quicker.

The increase in members along with tv publicity the past months seems to be really pushing the dev team to produce a better product as they have been releasing weekly updates.

Today's update released AI for limerock and a tire update to the Porsche cup car.
Reading through the thread looks very promising and getting alot of approval.
Sounds like they have solved the issue with the tires getting up to temp in a reasonable timeframe and have removed the need for tire warmers, along with better sidewall that doesn't feel like mush.

They have also been updating the track surroundings and banners for the tv broadcasts.
Overall things just seem to be happening at a much quicker rate of late.....which I won't complain.

As much as I enjoy seeing full servers at all hrs the racing can be hit or miss and the form treads have been quit comical of late with all the new comers and there questions.
Some will stick around and some will return to console racing, as long as the majority of increased cash flow goes back into development I am ok with it.

 

[Maaznz]

Another good thing about this increase in numbers is will mean a flow-on to other racing games, which will mean more money for their developers to grow and bring in more people. A high tide raises all ships..

 

[BrunoBæ]

My guess/prediction is that the racing games with the most professional organizing of races will benefit most of this corona initiated raise in online participation.
And watching how unfocused many of iRacings competitors does act its no surprise that iRacing probably will gain most.

 

[Eckhart von Glan]

but, there have been problems too, read this post from the official iRacing forums (actually I never had the problems they describe, but atm I only do a race on Tuesday and a race on Wednesday and that's it). Skip Barber splitting into upwards of 15 grids on a weekday night is just sooooo cool, basically everyone on the grid is your level, no other online experience gets to within a mile of that, it's pure joy!
Here's the text about some technical problems they face:

This past week we've had a few issues where we've had a large number of errors that have impacted your ability to use the service. I'd like to provide some insight into the reasons that this happens, what we are doing about it, and what you can do. We've been keeping pace with the growth of the service by adding resources in every area of the infrastructure. This includes new race servers, including a new race farm, web servers, and database resources, etc. Network bandwidth continues to be significantly over-provisioned, but we are still adding capacity on the routes that we foresee the potential for an upcoming need. The significant application components are race, web, and database services. The issues we have been experiencing are related to resource contention and how the services respond to that contention. This problem can be described using a traffic analogy of a multi-lane highway. If you are using the web site or in a race session, you are a car on this highway. When we add another race server or more web capacity, we are adding more lanes, so we can accommodate more traffic. For the most part, this works really well with everyone moving along in their own lanes at speed. We start to have problems when people are exiting the highway to stop for more fuel, snacks, or other resources needed to continue the trip. In our case, these resources are most likely data in a database. Web and race servers use the database to coordinate race session status, owned content, etc. The databases do a good job of making sure that only one change is made at a time so that data is consistent, but this limits the number of changes that can be made at any one time. Every other request for access needs to wait. Back to our traffic analogy, we can think of this as an exit off the highway that has a single lane. If there is a dedicated exit lane that forms well in advance of the exit and drivers move in a coordinated fashion, this too can all go smoothly, until it doesn't. When there are problems at an exit on a highway, it first impacts those wanting to exit but then some drivers try to cut the line. This starts impacting other lanes of traffic and in the worst cases, it impacts many lanes of traffic. It can impact drivers that don't need anything at the exit. And sometimes if there is a car wreck at the exit, then things go poorly for all very quickly. The way we can address these issues in our infrastructure mirror those in the real world. We can add lanes to the exit. We can lengthen the exit only lane and add barriers to prevent drivers from cutting the queue. We've been making changes to our applications so that they'll use these queues rather than cutting into the exit lane at the point of exit. In specific terms, some of our oldest application infrastructure, which includes the web and race servers, directly access the database tables rather than rely on a data service. Even with changes to add more exit lanes and provide queuing, some of our apps still overwhelm these resources. So why do we not make the changes needed to minimize these problems? We have been making these changes. All of our web requests are queued so as to not overload shared resources. Sometimes an individual server will be overwhelmed but users on other servers are fine. But these changes alone are not enough. We're had to completely overhaul and that is the Beta UI. The Beta UI (BUI) application infrastructure uses the same resources but accesses them in an orderly fashion. We've focussed development on the functions necessary to join races. If all members used BUI we would be in much better shape. While members were having trouble those currently in BUI were still functional and only began having issues after the classic website locked up resources. Currently about half of our members are using BUI vs the classic website. We've only been able to scale at all because of its adoption. We understand that some prefer the website. It's our goal to make whatever changes we can to BUI to win over as many as we can. We have no goal other than creating an enjoyable product and that means that it is available and a joy to use. We know that even BUI can't be all that we want until we solve the problems of the resource contention. You can help us solve this problem by using BUI more. And if you don't like it, we welcome threads of discussion so that we can improve it. I can't promise that every complaint will be addressed, or quickly, but it all factors into our next steps The more specific the feedback, the more likely can do something about it. Thank you for reading. Thank you for your membership. We are committed to continuous improvement to deliver a product and experience that keeps you all happy. In closing, know that many of our current staff working on these issues were first iRacing members like yourself. We are almost always looking to hire sim and web engineers. If you have expertise with C++ or ReactJS, we'd love to hear from you. source: Chris Page, iRacing staff

 

[Eckhart von Glan]

My guess/prediction is that the racing games with the most professional organizing of races will benefit most of this corona initiated raise in online participation.
And watching how unfocused many of iRacings competitors does act its no surprise that iRacing probably will gain most.

They're super lucky to have built the whole service around online competition which is what people see on their screen now as Ersatz for real life racing. Isn't that called a "killer-app"?

 

[maelstrom]

They're super lucky to have built the whole service around online competition which is what people see on their screen now as Ersatz for real life racing.

Or alternatively, for those old enough to remember, you could compare it to the VHS and Betamax video formats. VHS was definitely the worst of the two but because it had the most users and backing, it became the de facto standard.

 

[BrunoBæ]

Or alternatively, for those old enough to remember, you could compare it to the VHS and Betamax video formats. VHS was definitely the worst of the two but because it had the most users and backing, it became the de facto standard.

Hehe I take it as you must be joking a bit here.
Because your analogy is not completely fair.

My personal oppinion is that iRacings complete 24/7 service is more or less ahh "perfect".
But also my personal oppinion is that the tire models of most other socalled racing sims (rF2, ACC, Raceroom and probably AMS1/2 and LFS!) are much more "realistic".

CatsAreTheWorstDogs: Instead of "realistic" I prefer the use of "have a more intuitive car behaviour".

CatsAreTheWorstDogs2: Its more or less solely iRacings TM that keeps me away of resub´ing. Hehe and also that the dont support Win7 anymore

 

[Maaznz]

Bruno, when was the last time you actually tried iRacing?

 

[BrunoBæ]

Good point - because as I said they have excluded me from re-subbing because of my Win7
- but I have followed almost all serious reviews of this v7 and havent found any serious(!) reviewer who says that the v7 does substantially change the direction of the tire model behaviour against the v6 I absolutely hated.

CatsAreTheWorstDogs: And following your logic then I shouldnt be able to say anything about the v6 if I had only tried the v5.
Both v5, 6, 7 is still basically iRacings tire models - and does therefore still have iRacings weird car behaviour(IMO).

CatsAreTheWorstDogs: Instead of "realistic" I prefer the use of "have a more intuitive car behaviour".

 

[mozzie]

Good point - because as I said they have excluded me from re-subbing because of my Win7
- but I have followed almost all serious reviews of this v7 and havent found any serious(!) reviewer who says that the v7 does substantially change the direction of the tire model behaviour against the v6 I absolutely hated.

CatsAreTheWorstDogs: And following your logic then I shouldnt be able to say anything about the v6 if I had only tried the v5.
Both v5, 6, 7 is still basically iRacings tire models - and does therefore still have iRacings weird car behaviour(IMO).

By that logic you should never have installed Windows 7 because Windows Vista was such a monumental failure- it’s the same operating system just that Windows 7 is more refined and less buggy than Vista.

If you were on the iRacing forums you would see loads of posts about people praising NTM v7 especially on the V8 supercars and with the latest Porsche Cup tyre changes— even people that were heighly critical of NTM v6. Soooo, no. You’re logic doesn’t hold out even by your own admittance.

 

[maelstrom]

If you were on the iRacing forums you would see loads of posts about people praising NTM v7

But are they praising it when compared to v6, or the tyre models in other sims?

 

[mozzie]

But are they praising it when compared to v6, or the tyre models in other sims?

They are praising the tyre model in regards to how it reacts to what people “perceive” to be real life behaviour.

And, what makes you think other sims are realistic? I can show you telemetry from rF2 tyre behaviour that is far from realistic.

 

[maelstrom]

And, what makes you think other sims are realistic?

Other sims have their own tyre model fans with online reviews praising them (ACC probably being the most notable recently). I suppose it's all down to personal opinion. If It feels good to you, then who am I to argue?

 

[BrunoBæ]

Other sims have their own tyre model fans with online reviews praising them (ACC probably being the most notable recently). I suppose it's all down to personal opinion. If It feels good to you, then who am I to argue?

Reasonable oppinion - instead of fighting very hard to convince others that they need to agree with your subjective personal oppinion
Thats also the reason I phrased myself this way:

But also my personal oppinion is that the tire models of most other socalled racing sims (rF2, ACC, Raceroom and probably AMS1/2 and LFS!) are much more "realistic".

CatsAreTheWorstDogs: Instead of "realistic" I prefer the use of "have a more intuitive car behaviour".

 

[BrunoBæ]

They're super lucky to have built the whole service around online competition which is what people see on their screen now as Ersatz for real life racing. Isn't that called a "killer-app"?

"killer-app"?
Hehe probably more or less what most iRacing tifosis think
I read all the stuff you quoted - interesting
And eventhough Im a bit sceptical about the full analogy he makes about multi laned highways with a lot of different exits - then it probably gives a reasonable visual imperssion about the problems thay have with their old and new UI.
Hehe as an old NR2003/GTP mod entusiast I know that when he talks about "our oldest application infrastructure" then it is actually more or less the originally NR2003 game that offered this multiplayer "infrastructure".
With all the things iRacing then year after year build their 24/7 service upon.
So they were not kind of accidentially "super lucky" - because both Kaemmer and the other Papyrus guys did exactly know what a gem they had when they bought the rights to the NR2003 code.

In specific terms, some of our oldest application infrastructure, which includes the web and race servers, directly access the database tables rather than rely on a data service.

 

[Maaznz]

Wow Bruno, you're really stretching it there aren't you lol..


So, when did you actually last play iRacing?