Have you seen a NASCAR race recently (I'm sure you have)? They are struggling to beat IndyCar these days and they tell their T.V. partners to not pan the audience (because there's nobody there).
I've been watching all season, yeah, for better and for worse. The suspicious camera angles are pretty painful; it felt both vindicating and horridly disappointing to see New Hampshire completely barren. My family used to go there every Cup race weekend, but it just got way too expensive and uncomfortable and my parents struggled to keep interest. We basically tuned out for most of the Sprint Cup era until 2016, which was a phenomenal season that got me back into it.
IndyCar's struggling for fanbase, too, though, phenomenal as their racing is. It's a problem with motorsports overall, though you know that. NASCAR's just very good at trying to brand itself a thousand different ways to alienate everyone simultaneously.
I've played in a NASCAR league here and done 1/2 of the career...and I didn't ask for more cars. Many of us didn't. Many of us would have picked at least a damage model online. Why would any SIM fan want more video proof of a game that sucks graphically? It's like "fixing" a car that doesn't run by giving it a car wash.
I don't think sim fans are really the main target audience here, much as they weirdly touted being 'the most realistic' with Heat Evolution (which was nowhere near correct). Most of the audience is just people who figure "oh, hey, cool, there's a NASCAR game, I should try it"; the sim half of the fandom has plenty of other games with mods or off-brand versions, so that's a very comparatively difficult and niche market to corner.
It does very much needle at me that the game's subreddit and all is flooded with requests for new features instead of any focus on what's in there already and could use tweaking, or even just giving a thumbs-up to what works.
And I know how they operate. I've dealt with them in the boardroom, and there isn't a better brand of thugs outside of the FIA. It worked for a while. But call me skeptical that they have suddenly changed after a grandkid or two and fans that are leaving in droves. Are they hands off? I don't know, but it would be 100% out of character for them to be that way, so you will kindly have to prove it.
If you have boardroom experience with them, you know better than I. My side is pure speculation from playing way too many NASCAR games and having a mild interest in reading the legal info with each title I play to see where all the licenses go. My assumption of a 'hands off' approach comes mostly from Eutechnyx just being allowed to release the same game four/five times (technically, 704 was responsible for the last time) as long as the teams and sponsors got to put 'a video game appearance' in their contracts, even as the titles got worse and worse reviews which reflected terribly on the sport.
I don't doubt there is demand, just like there was "demand" for a NASCAR game. And I am a fan of the game, especially the physics and the A.I. So, they have a good base, but unlike Codemasters, they are not building on the strength of that base, but going off on a Forza-like tangent. If they don't improve the online experience and make the physics and graphics better, they are done.
That's a very good point; it definitely could just use more tweaking. I was going to bring up the issue of this having to be a yearly franchise as one of the reasons they'd keep scrambling to change everything, but using Codemasters' F1 series as a reference point, CM's very good at making slight changes to each title that still keep them extremely distinct. I'm not even much a fan of Formula One and I still routinely boot up F1 2013; it's a blast. If the NASCAR games similarly followed suit as a solid racing game first and foremost, with the brand name thus just associated with a good game and intriguing players from there, that'd be the ideal; diving into NASCAR-fan fanservice is a questionable move in that light but allows them to advertise a reason to dive in, and a seemingly diverse game experience to show off to people that'd be put off by just ovals or just Cup cars or whatnot.
Whether that holds up past the two-hour Steam refund window is the biggest question. That neat little feature did quite some damage to Evolution in the early stages, as it should've.
I've had no issues with graphics besides the horrid anti-aliasing on the catch fences. The stylized brightly-colored look is really neat, in my book, but I'm biased towards a certain stock-car racing series from Sega anyhow. It's something I keep hearing people harp on, but it's actually got a distinct visual style to it that's easy on the eyes, which is better to me than being the nine-jillionth game to try to look photorealistic and then age horribly as tech gets better.
Oh, and [Logan Lucky] is going to be the best movie in 10 years:
As a fan of heist flicks and oval racing, I can only hope so. The trailers haven't entirely impressed yet but I've got my fingers crossed.
Sorry if this is overly long, I basically held off for a while wondering how I was gonna argue with you and then kinda realized I didn't disagree nearly as much as I thought on the first pass-through.