Try reading the EULA for just about any piece of proprietry software you've ever installed on your pc, including LFS. You might get a nasty shock
Can you sell your copy of LFS? What about Windows? You don't actually buy software with the right to do anything you want with it, you buy the license to use it. Same with iRacing.
EULAs are as far as I know not enforceable in court as they are a contract you have to agree to after making the purchase. Software vendors just include it anyway in the hope people forget that and they're mostly succeding.
The LFS lisence is different in that you have to agree to ba able to purchase. I don't particularily like the terms of that agreement either (especially the activation part which prevents me from playing older versions, which is a bit sad since I have a lot of good memories from them), but I'm willing to put up with them because the product is stellar and quite frankly Scawen and the rest of the devs seem like standup guys and I doubt they would pull anything.
I will not give the same trust to a big company or even a medium developer like iRacing. Too many businessmen and too few actual developers with a passion for the product.
It may be, but they're much bigger than the LFS devs, and I'm quite sure the actual developers have little to say in regards to pricing strategies. That's enough to put me off it. I'm not saying I won't pay up. It may be freaking spectacular, and I'm not stupid enough to let something good pass me by, but nothing will make me feel happy about the pricing structure.
That's why I wrote, "Product vs. Service debate aside". My comment was aimed more at the folks who lament about it being "tons of money" as if that's the main problem.
I'll honestly say that I'm still undecided on the subscription issue, but not too happy about it.
AstroBoy, you have to decide that for yourself, but imo it's a yay. I'm sure everyone be able to get a better idea of things once the nda lifts and the discussion turns from conjecture to facts
Spending millions of dollars and several years developing a product which many think won't, or don't want to succeed and which conventional game publishers wouldn't touch with a barge pole must take some passion for the product, don't you think?
But that's the modern next step with pricing and selling stuff. Everything is either a service or product. And a product can be sold with a service and call the whole package as service. With everything. With phone lines, internets, tv, games, everything. You are always offered some slightly cheaper alternative if you take the longer contract. iracing is no different. Buy one month, price is the highest. Pay for one year and the price is lower. As a whole the monthly subscription has come to stay. I personally dislike being tied to long contracts but as long as there is the reasonable option, like the one month test/try option with iracing I don't complain. It is simple economics, to get the people to make long subscriptions to your services is guaranteed to keep the influx of money more stable than a one-off payment. The truth is that every service that has anything to do with internets or mobile phones is mostly based on long term subscription.
The sad truth is, people have stepped over the last change and went direcly into the last option, piracy. People download stuff from the internets as they please. This along with other aspect have created the illusion that everything in internets is free or very cheap. Then comes iracing which is probably hard to crack, not cheap, has promise as being a goood title. I'm 100% sure some people are just offended by it simply because there is no way to get it free by alternative means. Or no way to get it free to even test it, almost unheard of with ineternet based service! In one way it is a piece of software that is interesting but at the same time there is basically no chance of getting your hands on it without paying. And it is not cheap.
Sure, people want to own the stuff they buy but in the end it is just a question of habbit. You pay to get it yourself, not pay to get to use it. Or so we would like to do. The first step of this model was when you started buying software from internets without any physical media. People were against it with the same reasons as they are now against the monthly subscriptions. The difference of not getting a physical disk for the money (like with LFS) is not too far off from paying a monthly fee to be allowed to use some x software.
I personally don't like monthly subscriptions simply because all those small payments add up and eventually those 15$ per month fees stack up to hundreds. But I don't see it as any kind of problem for iracing. People just hate the new system but after a while they get used to it and suddenly paying 50$ up front for new game seems expensive. It is a scary thought but at the end of the day we are all tied to out habbits.
I didn't mean to insinuate the iRacing devs aren't passionate about their product. I'm sure they are. I phrased that badly.
What I'm getting at is that I doubt those millions were spent purely for the "passion for the product". There must be some expectation of being able to make that money back. It's a huge gamble, true, but there must be some hope that it pays off in the end. It just seems much more like a normal business when compared to the LFS way of wanting to do their own thing without anyone breathing down their necks. I just respect that approach so much more and it makes me much more willing to spend, even though I think the licensing terms are less than ideal.
John Henry is known to be a sim racing fanatic. He ran his own Nr2003 league before iRacing. Obviously it has to work and be worthwhile financially - but from what I've read his passion for the venture goes beyond simply making a profit.
Pity, it runs flawlessly on my machine, yours must be too "clean"
The dilbert guy probably solicitcs their target demographic, which we don't see...
I don't necessarily disagree with you on all of that, but it's the way things are moving, and the consumer has made it that way through piracy and whatnot. I really don't think that iRacing could afford to be pirated which is unfortunately probably one of the reasons there is no offline play etc. Consumers in general have been ripping off developers since day one of this industry. We could argue about why and how but the fact is simply that it's done. Consumers have used the internet to their advantage in a major way, and now developers are starting to do the same and we don't like it.
I prefer the term charismatic...
Rabid or not I just tend to put my heart into everything I do, so if I have an argument about something I tend to present it with some chili peppers. I thought you guys would know that; how long have I been here?!
And for the record, I'm not "happy" about having to pay for iRacing, obviously if I was given the choice I would rather not just like everyone else. However, that doesn't translate into "it's a lot of money" (it's not, based simply on the market).
Sure it is! It breaks monotony from work and forces Shot to come up with humourous phraseologies!
Sorry, my point was perhaps a little diffused - I wasn't calling the pricing disrespectful, just saying generally that anyone who wants to be in the avant-garde can expect to be questioned harshly. My comments about respect were by the by, a quick reaction to your comment about respect being due just because its a different kind of venture. This just isn't true.
Its precisely because its a new venture that paying customers should be negotiating the best deal possible. Not the best deal for Dave and his mates, but the best deal for us, the consumers.
This will take us a bit off topic 'cos I have views about that ... oh, whatever... Look, if you try to make a living out of anything thats infinitely reproduceable, then the only way to do it is to artificially strangle your product.
Passing the cost of that onto the consumer remains something we should all be unhappy about. No one's found a way around that conundrum yet, but that doesn't mean we have to stop trying.
Well not to burst your bubble, but there is a thing called insim, which can do pretty much anything you want...so... to answer your question yes LFS has the groundwork in place for most anything someone could dream of in terms of league management, just have to have the right skills in place to develop and manage it. As well as the fortitude to stick it out when things look like it might go pear shaped.
my 2p worth. No way I would pay that much a month for something that isn't established. Once they get their feet on the ground it's a possibility, but not before then, I can think of better things to do with my money =)
http://web.ukct.net/ Have a read there and you will see what I am talking about.
Agreed, CTRA has done incredible things with LFS. And the potential exists for even greater things to be done with LFS (CTRA-X2, for example).
At one time some people were calling for the STCC system (prior to CTRA-X) to be fully integrated into LFS. I would be for that, especially if I could race Legend cars at South Boston Speedway and Spec Racer Fords at Mid-Ohio under that system. It appears that I need to buy a different sim to do that though.
Anything is possible, don't give up hope on LFS having real tracks just yet.
I don't know, the problem with allowing the game developers to manage the league system is, say for instance you have a driver that is continually wrecking someone and will not heed warnings, what will the devs do?
They are now stuck in a conflict of interest. On one side there is the the person that says that this person should be banned. But on the other the developers need to feed their kids so they let the guy off with another warning to keep the driver in the game and paying the monthly fee.
This might be said for many different things, but when a new system, like I-Racing, tries to sell monthly, with NO userbase, they are off the bat going to be very lenient to bolster their numbers, more than likely anyways. I think a monthly subscription fee will work very well, but I find it difficult to put my faith in them just yet =)
I am serious though, don't give up hope for LFS and having the ability for real tracks/cars. We already have a few cars already, tracks must surely come next =) I think the biggest problem is fee's. IIRC the rights to place silverstone in a game is about 40,000 pounds or $80,000 and the devs are not in a position to pay for that.
I think if the community brought some concrete information to the devs about tracks that are willing to let their track be published for free personally I think the devs would love the idea.
The iRacing service is offering real tracks and cars as one of it's selling points. At a degree of accuracy never before seen. I don't think comparing the two sims is really valid at this point.
I'm kinda curious how this will turn out, price itself isn't a big issue if there is enough well done content behind it. I have my doubts about some of that "accurate laser gadget" marketing talk as it's definately not the best way to model most of ingame objects, but I'm more interested in physics and the way online gameplay is going to work.
I'd expect the best tbh. As far as physics and track accuracy is concerned anyway.
I'm still not paying that stupid amount for a title i cant even practice offline with though.
BBT might go on like the pricing structure is the norm these days, but as well all know the reality is there very few subscription based games on the market.
No sim has ever gone down this route before. They are going down the mmorpg route with monthly subs then combining it with the flight sim model of charging more for every little bit of content on top of that.
The more people that support this pricing model just make it more likely to happen to loads more software in the future.
I wonder how elite people are going to feel when they are coughing up $100 p/m for their gaming pleasure.
13$ a month if you pay for 1 year subscription. Considering how low the dollar is worth nowadays its affordable (atleast for me). What annoys me is that to get more content u have to pay. I think i will wait and see before i get a subscription.
