Now that would light a fire in LFS development. As someone on the outside Kegetys has been able to accomplish some very cool things even if we can't use them all.
In the end for me at least LFS is slowly dieing. Having been here from nearly the begining, and seeing it evolve over time I have always felt the pace of development was way too slow. I don't blame the devs personaly for this, I think alot of it has to do with what LFS really is, a cool little experiment that took on a life of its own and has managed to remain at the forfront of Racing Sims because the challangers have fallen short of their goals. Drivers Rapublic and nKPro both looked to be great but DR looks dead, I was really looking forward to this one, and nKPro fell appart and is still tryign to pick itself up.
iRacing's subscription and pay for content model is not a new one. I is exactly the same as another title that the entire comunity was going Gaga over several years ago. It did not have a subscription service but you were going to have to buy each car and track seperatly each woudl come on a credit card CD which you could add to your current content. No one was bitching about that back then. We all remember
Racing Legends don't we?
I don't know how poor most of you are that has you fussed about $13 US a month. That is 1hr of work for me, 2g of fuel, 2 trips to the fast food place or 1 trip to the movie theater. Its nothing, even if I only play for 2 hours a week, it brakes down to like $1.60 a hour for entertainment. That sis dirt cheap.
So I look at it like this. I can continue to make LFS my primary racing sim and hope to get some new content, features or vehicle dynamics improvemtns from a development team of 2 people who are not wealthy and al have other distractions, (Scawen's growing family) or I can spend a little money and give iRacing a try, which has a nice experanced development team, partnerships with lots of great real racing entities and the good finacial backing from a guy who is a sim enthusist. It becomes a no brainer. I will refocus on iRacing, even if it is still lagging behind LFS on some features or even all of them it will evolve as a far faster pace.
LFS will not continue to remain on top if it continues as is has been. Of that I am absolutly positive.