I find these posts regarding the price of LFS frankly ridiculous. Any other game that you try to buy on the shelves today will cost around £44.
The fact that Scawen (wrongly IMO), has branded LFS an alpha product and decided not to distribute LFS in the high street has compounded the issue. His latest post seems to agree that the alpha tag is no longer applicable.
From my personal point of view, I have never in my whole life experienced anything that even comes close to LFS in terms of value. £24 for 5 years of constant entertainment. I spend double that every month on Sky TV, which thanks to LFS, I never get to watch
Asking another £12, or whatever they ask, from users who have been playing the game since 2002 is absolutely nothing. We have all seen the alternative with iRacing, which thank god they have not decided to do. If, god forbid, then went down that route, I would have spent £100's in the last few years. Also, if LFS did go the subscription route, I would leave instantly. But what I would happily pay extra for is exactly what the community has been asking for, real tracks, with laser scanned quality (and hopefully bumps), and more content.
May I talk hypothetically for a minute..
Scawen wants to charge £24 for S3, on top of S2. So, LFS S3, for a new user, costs £46 (normal retail price for a game these days). For us it is £24.
For this money, they will spend the money on marketing and distributing LFS in shops, putting in 10 Real tracks, putting in 5 more cars in, surround sound, dx9/10 quality graphics, better physics, sanctioned races/servers.
So, if they did this, they could afford to hire some graphics guru's, get some tracks laser scanned, and increase the user base. With some sanctioned servers/leagues/comps aswell LFS could easily (IMO) take over iRacing. iRacing get's away with charging >£10 per month, plus content cost, for a product that is vastly inferior to what LFS "could" be, with a modest amount of investment.
Hypothetical over
LFS already has a huge physics update coming, a new car and the prospect of S3 on the horizon. This is not before time IMHO, but it will be free.
When S3 does come out, I hope it will be a big change, but I do fear that it won't. I hope to god that S3 doesn't cater for the pentium 3/4's that LFS caters for atm. It will be 2010/2011, and to expect the majority (probs 90+%) of the userbase to have to put up with shite DX8 graphics and 2 channel sound to please the tiny minority, in spite of the huge progress computers have made in the last 10 years since lfs was first released, would be a massive shame
/rant over