The reason some would complain is because iRacing is the other subscription based simulation. They are charging high prices for real life racing, stuff that costs much more than a "hobby" and put the price range for people who want a racing hobby.
However racing RC cars is already a hobby, so why simulate that and put the price right up there with virtually the real thing? If iRacing cost as much as racing the same cars did in real life, I'm sure none of us would run it, but instead just do the real world stuff.
I use to do RC stuff myself (both racing and for fun). Retired myself after 2 seasons and afterwards I tried VRC. It's fun and would be a great practice tool, but I could practice for much cheaper than that.
I like this, we need more virtual hobby simulators! How about a virtual gardening simulator? I'd make it free to play but use micro transactions for things like seeds, fertilizer, or pesticides, and sell expansions to give access to things like greenhouses! :up:
I wouldn't have thought there'd be a market for a game like this but I do know how expensive R/C cars can be, even if they're just used for fun and not in competition, so I can see how certain people might like the idea enough to pay the price. Obviously you did your maths before you set that price, it can't be easy to set a price for such a niche product with a relatively small market.
I'll admit I do need to give the tires on the 1:10 nitro cars a bit more love to make those better. They're a bit loose with fast steering inputs which is probably what you saw that didn't look right.
1:8 nitro so far seems to get the most "this feels great" types of comments. Here's a video I made with a real car and the sim overlayed on top of each other:
This was probably more than six years ago. I've improved it since, although you do have to use different tire diameter splits than in reality in Pro to get it driving really nicely at the moment. I'll get that sorted eventually. I'm not yet 100% happy with all of the cars. The electric cars on carpet tracks appear so far to be the most popular.
We showed this to a room full of race engineers at a conference in Detroit a few years ago during a presentation Doug Milliken and I made on the tire testing we did for the new VRC Pro. It took awhile for any of them to figure out which one was real and which was simulated. That was a fun day.
The vehicle inertias were supplied by Serpent engineers that pulled it out of their design software, so there's no guessing or problems on that end. They sent me pages of stuff right down to the screws and bolts, pretty much.
Tire forces were measured directly on a machine that Milliken and an engineering student built. Think TIRF/Calspan, but a whole lot smaller and not as complicated and expensive Doug Milliken and I spent quite a few days together doing the actual testing. Good times. So I used real data everywhere that we could get or produce it. We even had quite an expensive wind tunnel testing project done in Holland. Unfortunately that data turned out to be useless without a rolling road, but it was neat to see the report and data anyway. I tried!
Having said that, a couple of the cars could use a little massaging to make them better. I'll get to that. It's only day 2 now..
Anyway, give it a spin. If you don't like it, get a refund. If you kind of like it, but want better handling, tell me what it is you don't like and I'll see what I can do to improve it. We have a physics section in the forums for that.
Fun video here with my friend, the founder/owner of Virtual Racing Industries:
1:5 scale looks fun for sure. I don't know if we'll make those or not though. Probably not for a very long time. Most of the requests for new onroad cars during beta testing were for 1:12 electrics. Everybody seems to be dying for offroad too which will be a major thing to do.
I'm pretty sure we'll do offroad before seriously considering 1:5 scale, so the safest answer to give you on that would probably be a simple "no, we're never doing 1:5 scale"
If it saves NASA 101 million per month somewhere else and nets a 1 million per month in savings, you bet!
This forum is so full of useful business advice considering what kind of simulators are in demand and what the pricing should be, I'm shocked I didn't take full advantage of it earlier.
Here's another dumb idea that would obviously never work or get built:
Good thing some of you guys weren't around before there were car simulators too. Somebody who wanted to make one might have listened to the wrong advice and stopped before they started.
One more thing I forgot to mention: You can earn about 10 virtual Euros per month if you're fairly active which will offset the monthly membership cost considerably. I'm not sure how exactly that works, but it doesn't require you to play 12 hours per day every day or anything like that.
I wrote the physics engine and do all the vehicle dynamics stuff. I have nothing to do with the marketing, web site, pricing, bundling of packages, return policy, etc.. If somebody really wants to know more specifics I can get the info. What seemed relevant and missing was the info that it was possible to earn vEuros in game.
I appreciate this might be a nice sim for RC racers, and I'm sure that they are willing to pay the money, but for us sim racers, it is way too much. The demo costing money, and we can ask for a refund? The British just don't do that kind of thing, don't you know
Personally I would have liked to try it out, but there is no way I am going to pay for a demo (as I wouldn't claim a refund), and I certainly wouldn't pay the prices for the full game. I would like to ask a question. Who set these crazy high prices for the game? They are the highest of any game that I know of "IN THE WORLD", including iRacing.
If you had to pay 1 cent to try LFS, you might not be playing it now? Seems like you'd have missed out on something great with such a strict purchasing policy
Pieter Bervoets, the owner of the project that has sunk a couple million bucks into this over the years, sets the prices.
Most expensive sim in the world? I'll take that as a compliment
In all seriousness I don't see how anyone can make that claim without full information, especially if all one has seen is the subscription price on page one and never got any further into it. What about content? Tracks? Cars? Etc..
I've already spent a lot more on iRacing than anyone ever could on VRC.
Anyway, I wasn't really here to try to sell it to anybody new or get in some big debate about pricing and so forth. There have been a lot of people waiting for years for this, so I stopped in to let them know it was done. For those that couldn't care less about it:
The point he raised was that he wouldn't try it because he had to pay for the demo.
Yes. We've been doing this now for eleven years. This is the fourth version. Total rewrite from the ground up this time around for Pro. Six years on this latest one.. Yikes! That doesn't come cheap for a team of nine people regardless of what silly thing they're working on all throughout it
Ofcourse, in all seriousness who on earth would pay for demo?! I wouldn't and yes i probably haven't bought lfs also if the demo would have been charged.