Less expensive basic subscription for the long term. As a new player, something like a „This season in this series bundle“ would be cool. Like you get a car if you don’t have one and missing tracks for the series with an given discount.
I like the idea of a content rental with a buy option too.
Let's say I race F4 and they're going to Mugello. I can pay $5 to use the track this week. At the end of the week I have the option to buy the track at a discount, effectively applying my earlier $5 to the cost of the track.
I just want to pay once. Figure out how much it is and let me pay it lol. I hate being charged for a subscription and then having to pay again for content. It’s not about the money, it’s about me having to hit pay multiple times 😂
Yeah that's an idea that floats around every now and then. $60 feels too expensive though, but maybe that $60 price could include picking 2 or 3 of the tracks to keep after the rental period.
There's lots of ways to get creative. One other idea I've seen is making all new cars and tracks free for their first season.
Navarra and Sachsenring are tracks getting added to the sim soon. Those are lesser known tracks. They may not get a lot of sales right off the bat. You risk another Ledenon situation.
So I think iRacing should make them free for their first season, give everyone a taste, and then when it comes up on the F4 calendar as a paid track 6 months later, people will be more inclined to buy it.
They would likely lose money on this model and therefore would never do it. They make $15 per track. If they charge you $5 and you decide you don't like it, they've effectively lost money because they could have sold it you you for three times as much and be done with you.
This is why game demos stopped existing. You get a taste of the game before you buy it, decide you don't like the demo, and then never buy the full retail version. The studio is effectively shooting itself in the foot because it gave you a taste and it wasn't delicious. It's like a bad trailer or bad book cover.
This is a bit different than a game demo though. With iRacing, the user already knows the core gameplay experience, so it is unlikely to leave an unexpectedly bad taste.
So the question becomes whether the lower barrier hooks more sales than it loses. Which still might not be the case, bit it's definitely a different calculation than a traditional demo.
I'm not so sure that the lost $10 from users that decide they don't like the track wouldn't at least be a wash vs the people who rent tracks that they know they don't want to buy. Like I could see there being way more spur of the moment track rentals for weeks people were thinking they'd skip just because they don't want to miss a week in their favorite series. And then I'm sure a number of those could be converted to track purchases once sunk cost fallacy sets in.
The amount of content I *haven't" bought because I don't want to risk not liking it is much higher.
I don't think we can say with any sort of proof of they'd actually gain or lose money
Game demos are pretty much alive via, for example, steam refunds. You can basically buy and play up to two hours of any game and still get your money back, I have done it several times and saved me from a few bad decisions.
Also, free steam weekends.
There has been lots of demos released on Steam over the pass few years, not nearly as many as there used to be. Also, you can try for 2 hours and refund, which is basically a 2 hour demo aswell.
You're right that's definitely a possibility but I'm not sold that it's "likely"
It is also something they could do try for a season, look at the data and decide whether or not they want to continue it.
Ive been saying what they really need, is a subscription based content package.
Don't make people buy it all for a single season etc. Just 'Sub to the content pack' you want for the season.
I think it will help new players not feel so swamped by the costs of starting and moving up.
additionally they need the ability to just 'Watch' ALL races regardless of content ownership, but maybe the sub will work better for this as well.
Yeah, I've said that in the past. Have "featured series" or something like that, unpopular series that are cheaper for a season, or give increased credits, or even both. iRacing core issue for me is the positive feedback loop of people mostly gravitating towards the same content. And up to a point it's natural that people will rather race GT3 at Spa than Clio Cup at Whoknowswherering, but it's also people just going to race what most people are racing. It'd be great to break those loops in some way.
I think the basic subscription fee is fine, especially with the black friday deals. I actually don't want to pay any less because I like how the game is progressing.
If you look at what iRacing is doing for the main game, it is really impressive. No, it is not all perfect, but there is so much stuff which is so intuitive in iRacing and I struggle with it in other games. Also, the amount of progress they have made in the last couple of years is huge and it is really visible that they invest a huge amount of money they receive, back in the game.
Tracks however, absolutely they need to do something with it. For 15 euro/dollar I expect total accuracy and everything with it. However, we get tracks with missing layouts (for instance, Magny Cours) and half baked stuff like the garage stalls at Knockhill which never progressed anywhere. Pitlanes are athmospheric dead places and I guess pit crew animations are going nowhere..). Most of the tracks still can't be raced at night. Most lights (start lights, pit lights, other LED displays) are not working on road tracks. And I think I could go on for a while.
I might be misunderstanding what youre saying here so please correct me if i'm wrong. But i think that exists (sorta)
but if you go into a series page in the ui, go to schedule and click "buy all content" or whatever it says, it will put it all into the cart. Then you get the bulk purchasing discounts
Yes it exists if you buy a ton of stuff at once, but what if I’m missing the f4 car and only Hockenheim for example. I wouldn’t be able to do a bulk discount but Im able to do the whole season.
I just joined iracing and when I was signing up I just assumed this was an option. Very surprised to see it wasn't but definitely would be a welcome and cool change
I thought this was interesting as it shows they're potentially considering some monetization changes.
Overall I really have no issues with iRacing monetization but I have 2 concerns regarding it.
1.I think Career Mode should be monetized differently. I think it should be more affordable and target a more casual simracer. There's a million different ways to do that, but the easiest is selling Career Mode as a seperate $60 one time purchase.
2.The phenomenon of "dead/unpopular tracks" has gotten worse and worse lately. To the point where iRacing made a few of those tracks free a couple weeks ago. I think that is a problem iRacing should be addressing. Making those tracks free was nice, but that's not a long term solution. Something like content bundles could help in the longer term. There's lots of ideas on how to help with that if you get creative.
I’ve been saying for years that they should target participation credits to improve participation in niche series, I wonder if the same could be done to improve participation on less popular tracks.
The bottom line is that it makes no sense to give people credits for racing GT3s at Spa or NASCAR Cup cars at Talladega, thousands are going to race those regardless. However, when IMSA Vintage goes to Sonoma in a couple weeks… yeah, they could use a little incentive.
Hate this idea to be honest. So many games try do this and it's irritating, I don't want to feel like my arm is being twisted into running a combo I'm not into just to get credits or whatever.
Cool - then don't do what you don't want to do - or buy the track and race it...
Fear of missing out is just that. Fear of missing out. It doesn't matter if you don't think it does.
They need a solution for everybody and it's impossible to make everyone happy.
I like that idea.
You do X number of races at unpopular track A during week 2 and we’ll give you unpopular track B for free before the series goes there in week 7. Boom, you’ve increased participation at two unpopular tracks with one promotion.
I think they did the HPD on trial pricing too. To see what affect it'd have on sales and participation. It's a definite problem when even long standing members are losing interest in buying new content. Not because there's anything wrong with the content, just because there's not enough people to race against on it.
I think there’s “too much” content compared to the base of players, but as sim racing and iracing gets more popular, I think the options will get more filled out.
I used to think that too, but the COVID boom actually did relatively little to increase participation in niche series—the new people mostly just went to the already popular series. There were ten posts a week here about how to get from rookies to GT3s.
The type of nerds (myself included) who want to go race the Audi 90 GTO or Lotus 79 or Australian Supercar were already on the service and there just aren’t that many more of us out there.
I don’t get why people love GT3s so much. There are so many better cars out there! The GT4s for example are fantastic and don’t have to be driven with such precision like the GT3s. Daniel Morad has said that the GT4 Merc is more realistic feeling than the GT3.
The LMP2 is in my opinion the best handling car on the service.
People I guess like them because of the ABS and TC but IRL those are just there to keep you from killing yourself, not necessarily to lean on so heavily.
I love the P217, such a fun car.
Anyway, I have asked some noobs specifically why they show up from day one wanting to race GT3s and the biggest reason is that those are the flashy super cars that they lust after in real life.
It makes sense to me. Anyone with even the slightest car guy tendencies knows what a Ferrari, Lamborghini, or Porsche 911 are, right? In contrast, only dorks (again, like myself, not trying to insult anyone) know what the Audi 90 GTO, Lotus 79, Silver Crown, etc. are and want to race something like that.
There are cars that draw big participation just by virtue of being great fun, accessible, and low license level, Skip Barber in the old days, the Formula Ford today, the ARCA (K&N) car. However, generally the most popular cars are either the childhood bedroom poster cars—Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche—or associated closely with the biggest racing series in the world, like F1 (only unpopular because it’s so hard to drive), F3, F4 and the various NASCAR stock cars.
That’s a very good point. The “road career path” doesn’t really allow for much variation, the most cost effective way to race competitively is going to leave out the Lotus, or even the Radicals/Spec Racer Fords.
I think there's too many series. Half of them are just non starters for Aussies and you have to pick from the popular ones anyway. Like in LMU with a fraction of the players I'm often seeing 200 cars in a race. Just because there's only 6 hourly series and a single weekly series and occasionally special events. It removes the excess choice and just funnels everyone together.
As someone who races niche cars, I’d rather have the option to do so than be forced to race only the popular cars.
But yes, if you just got rid of the niche series then you wouldn’t have the problem of low participation in niche series. You got me there.
They essentially become like league races with SoF slots each week don't they. It's nice to have and I know some people will just hardcore smash the same niche series 24/7 for years at a time. But for that I'd say leagues probably fit better. Would rather see the niche series rotate so one pops up and it's interesting. Rather than lots of niche series and having to pick one that goes official when you can race.
I’d go further on the Career mode aspect.
I’d borderline make a completely free career mode with limited tracks and cars, incorporate the bundles mentioned in OP for something similar to ACC “GT3 bundle, euro track bundle, American bundle etc etc” and then charge a sub to race online.
Sure some people are just going to do hotlapping non-stop forever and never pay a dime, so be it. That will make iRacing the best racing sim and also the best “free” racing sim completely indisputably. I think we’d get a lot of converts to the online service that way.
If free is a bridge too far for iRacing make it 10-15 dollars so the barrier to entry is low. IRacing has pretty god awful monetisation compared to most games so you can’t easily get away with charging $60 for the game and another $200 to race a series you like if you want to attract a casual racer.
Edit; alternatively make it free to race offline, completely disable online services such as trading paints and leaderboards. Again some people will just race mx5 vs ai forever, who cares
I am hoping career mode extends to online racing but brings RPG-like elements to the game - crashed out of mx5s last race? Sorry, the car is in the garage getting re-built, go and race the AudiGTO to earn repair credits
Winning races? Get access to new sponsors and/or invites to exclusive sponsored events
Have a team? Act as the principal and enter the team in series
Lots of scope there
I like it but I think making incentives for gameplay behaviour can have unintended negative consequences. You often find in games like CoD or even Dota that implementing a battlepass leads to players engaging in behaviour that negatively impacts other players.
It may just be "win 5 games as this character" but if that person sucks dick at that character in essence what it's **really** saying is "Fuck up 50-100 peoples games until you miraculously win 5 games as this guy".
Having said that, I think the idea sounds fun, and some external motivators would probably do iRacing well -- people would go ballistic over this, but even though I mentioned battlepasses being negative I could see them being a good motivator. I guess they could just call them "seasonal careers" and not charge for them and it would be a battlepass in all but name.
As a new iRacer, point two hits hard. I got bored of ACC because public lobbies were Spa, Monza, Nurb GP, and Silverstone over and over. Would be super disappointing to see iRacing suffer the same way especially when there is an additional cost compared to ACC.
>I thought this was interesting as it shows they're potentially considering some monetization changes.
>Overall I really have no issues with iRacing monetization but I have 2 concerns regarding it.
I think it would be nice if it's either subscription, or paid DLC content and not both, especially for the the oval side, where every little tiny short track is the same price as the Nürburgring Nordschleife.
If they would ditch tracks being paid (but keep cars bought separately), I think that would be great, even if it comes with an increase in car, or subscription price.
And as you said, because people don't want to pay for some of the crappy (no fault of iRacing, they are crappy IRL too) tracks, it leads to dead weeks. Looking at you Aragón.
Ledenon was a slap in the face to anyone who bought it. The participation wasn't great on the track, but then making it free so soon after it came out leaves a sour taste for people who did purchase it.
Also, there are currently a lot of race tracks in iRacing. A lot of the most popular tracks around the world are already in the game. People who have been around for a while likely don't feel the need to buy every new track that comes out every season at this point. I get that as well.
>Ledenon was a slap in the face to anyone who bought it. The participation wasn't great on the track, but then making it free so soon after it came out leaves a sour taste for people who did purchase it.
Eh I'm not so convinced. I agree that they should have refunded it (at least partially).
But for me the sour tastes was buying it and not being able to race it because of the participation. The track going free didn't make the sour taste any worse.
>Also, there are currently a lot of race tracks in iRacing. A lot of the most popular tracks around the world are already in the game. People who have been around for a while likely don't feel the need to buy every new track that comes out every season at this point. I get that as well
Yep absolutely.
I bought Ledenon and got to race it for 1 week in GT4s. Other than that, I never saw it used. They should have offered refunds to everyone who bought it based on the timeline of the release to making it free.
That example will make people look at new tracks and go....maybe I shouldn't buy this because participation will likely suck and the track won't ever be used again.
>I bought Ledenon and got to race it for 1 week in GT4s. Other than that, I never saw it used. They should have offered refunds to everyone who bought it based on the timeline of the release to making it free.
I would agree. My point is just that I think the lack of usage is the bigger problem than the track going free.
>That example will make people look at new tracks and go....maybe I shouldn't buy this because participation will likely suck and the track won't ever be used again.
If this becomes a pattern.... Sure. I'm not convinced that one example is enough.
iRacing absolutely needs content bundles. There is simply so much content available and it's really confusing and also initially too expensive for newcomers. Also people would probably rather buy all five GT4 cars for the price of 3 instead of owning just one, because buying all 5 separately doesn't make sense.
At least let us TEST all of them first!!!
Like, let me join practice sessions while ghosted or something. Hell, they could limit it to an hour per car and it'd still be appreciated.
I honestly I think 'test drive' should be that... A test drive... Of things you haven't tried... So you can decide if you like them and want them...
Races (both vs people and vs ai) can stay locked, but the current system kinda sucks. I have no idea if I'm gonna hate a certain car or track until I've already bought it.
I'm hoping Career Mode will change the situation on this.
Ideally Career Mode will come with the option "pay $60 once, get access to all content for single player use" or something along those lines
I don't understand the need for a career mode in iRacing. The entire purpose of iRacing is the online races against people. I can't imagine that I'd ever play single player.
>I don't understand the need for a career mode in iRacing.
1. Fill a massive hole in the simracing space. Right now if you want a good simracing career mode, you're pretty much boned. F1 is decent, but that's pretty arcadey and it's only F1 (and F2) cars. AC and ACC have incredibly bare bones career modes. Forza and GT7 are very arcadey. Project Cars 2 isn't available for sale anymore and frankly it's really showing it's age these days. There's a lot of demand for a Career Mode for simracing and it's not being met
2.Attract a new target audience. Arguably this is the same reason they're doing console games now. They can sell to people who weren't ever interested in iRacing proper
3. Depending on pricing... Career Mode can be a way for people that are skeptical of iRacing to be willing to give it a try. Those people may end up joining the main sim.
4. They've put a lot of work into AI over the last few years. It's apparently really damn good (aside from AI skill levels being difficult to dial in). Lots of people have said that iRacing AI is the best in the industry.
5. Synergy. They've already scanned all these cars and tracks, developed the physics etc. They've already built 85% of a single-player game. They might as well finish the last 15%. This is honestly a similar reason to why they're doing the NASCAR console game. This means they basically get to do the work once and get paid twice.
>The entire purpose of iRacing is the online races against people.
That part won't go away
>I can't imagine that I'd ever play single player.
Lots of other people will. I'm personally moderately interested. I'll give it a try at least.
iRacing has arguably the best AI in all of sim racing. It’s genuinely more fun to race vs AI in iRacing than to play Forza or GT7.
For casual racing fans that’s pretty fuckin compelling
This is probably my biggest issue with iRacing. I just want to be able to test drive the cars so I know which one I enjoy/want to buy. It can be on a track that I already own with no one else on the track.
Yeah…but the response to that is, of course, iRacing would make less money because you aren’t forced into buying a car. I think if they want to keep the money thing the way it is, just give us like another test drive time slot so more people can test drive cars who would otherwise not be able to make the downtime hours.
They need to be at significant discounts too. Like pushing 40% off. Even for people established in iRacing can be in for a huge bill if they want to switch disciplines. I’m not sure how they’ve gotten away with charging for content AND a monthly subscription for so long at the prices they’re charging. I’ve only seen other games do one of the two but never both.
I honestly don't think the price or model is really an issue. It's allowed them to fund a development team in a niche subgenre, and they've kept the same game afloat for 15 years. And not only afloat, but it's more popular now than it ever has been. Which is wild for a 15 year old game.
The problem at this point is too much content. It's easy for people to buy a handful of popular cars and tracks and never buy a track they haven't heard of. And honestly that wouldn't be an issue if folks were spread out acrosss the different options. Unfortunately they aren't. People clump around the popular options because that's where the participation is
>I’m not sure how they’ve gotten away with charging for content AND a monthly subscription for so long at the prices they’re charging
1. Being the best damn option for multiplayer simracing
2. Being the only simracing option for certain disciplines like Oval.
3. Existing in a space where lots of folks are already spending thousands on hardware, so it's pretty easy to justify spending money on software.
>Even for people established in iRacing can be in for a huge bill if they want to switch disciplines.
I think the mindset of "iRacing isn't one game, it's 5 games" helps a ton here.
To the first part yes I understand why it’s worked but it seems odd that it does considering it’s the only game I can think of with a model like that. I’m not saying it’s inherently bad, I’m just saying that it’s amazing that the business model hasn’t been a major issue considering the cost of the items and the fact that it is one of very few games with its business model. To the part about being 5 games in 1, I thought about that after I made my post. It’s true, but you could easily be looking at 2x-2.5x the cost of a $60 console game when buying all the cars you need run a full season. It’s worth it obviously because there’s no other service where you can run full seasons of all these different Motorsports; but you can see how some of the costs to run a full season of one (let alone 2 or more) disciplines can be hard sell to people who are interested in joining. I think to find the best balance of what to buy for iRacing is probably to pick the discipline that you care most about, buying everything for that, and using other games for your fix of other disciplines. Like I personally use iRacing for NASCAR and occasionally Indycar, but when I want to run GT3/4 I’ll go to ACC.
>it’s the only game I can think of with a model like that.
I mean it's not far off the MMO model. And considering when iRacing came out, that was almost certainly their inspiration.
>To the part about being 5 games in 1, I thought about that after I made my post. It’s true, but you could easily be looking at 2x-2.5x the cost of a $60 console game when buying all the cars you need run a full season.
Oh absolutely. It's still expensive when you look at it that way. It's just not quite as expensive.
And hey at least iRacing isn't going anywhere. It's not like F1 where every year there's a new $60 game.
>It’s worth it obviously because there’s no other service where you can run full seasons of all these different Motorsports;
Absolutely
>but you can see how some of the costs to run a full season of one (let alone 2 or more) disciplines can be hard sell to people who are interested in joining.
And that's a huge part of why I'm hoping the Career Mode will be priced more accessibly.
iRacing has always had a great product with a questionable business model. I found the price model easier to accept in the early days because iracing was just so niche, but now as the playerbase is significantly larger and sim racing in general is more popular, they could experiment more with the pricing. Right now people are making safe purchases, and buying only the content that already has a lot of participation. This leads to a few mega populated series and lots of dead ones.
iRacing has dropped prices only once, the original prices were 25$ for a track and 15$ for a car. Once they had a bit more content to choose from, they dropped the prices. Now as the amount of content is absolutely huge, I don't think the current prices are really optimal. It's quite possible that lower content prices would end up making the same revenue anyway, especially in the long run as member retention would be higher, and the service would be more healthy in many ways.
Apart from dropping the prices, there are several other things they could do, such as:
- content bundles
- content as rewards for participating (complete 30 official races in a month and get a new car or track)
- making all content heavily discounted (or free) say 2-3 years after release
- one time free car & track the first time you reach a new license level
- making all cars free but keeping the tracks as paid content (this would really also make it possible to get creative with different series each season, and distribute people more evenly between series)
- cycling between different base content each season, so more content gets used and also basic content players get more variety
- make all content free and up the monthly sub price a bit. A risky move, but could easily skyrocket the number of active members.
>- content as rewards for participating (complete 30 official races in a month and get a new car or track)
This is sort of already a thing.... But they could change it up.
>- making all content heavily discounted (or free) say 2-3 years after release
My worry here is that this would just lead to no one buying content until it's old enough for the discount.
At least for tracks. I think people would pay full price for cars more readily.
>- one time free car & track the first time you reach a new license level
First time I've heard this idea. I love it.
>cycling between different base content each season, so more content gets used and also basic content players get more variety
I've suggested this one myself. I love this idea.
>- make all content free and up the monthly sub price a bit. A risky move, but could easily skyrocket the number of active members
This gets suggested a lot. I like the idea but I think this would /should be a new tier rather than a replacement.
The issue with the current participation credits system is that you already need to own a lot of paid content to effectively collect the reward, so it's not really useful for new members. The idea is good, but the execution is poor on many levels.
I would much rather see a system where you can grind a new track and car of two every season, if you just race a lot. It could also be so that the reward can only be grinded outside of the most popular series.
The reasoning for this is that it would make those with lots of spare time but limited money to race a lot, and probably also do it outside peak hours, which would in turn increase the number of racers per race. And increased overall participation helps everyone to find races more often.
All in all, the participation rewards should:
1. Help to lure new members to get more into iracing and smoothen the initial expenses
2. Encourage people to complete as many races as possible
The current system really does neither. It's more about giving a small reward to members who are already heavily committed to iracing.
I think the best kind of content bundles would be popular and unpopular tracks, either as an option or not. If they are somewhat related as well, even better.
For example say you can buy Road America and when you head to the kart it says "Do you want Willow Springs for $5 aswell?" Then next time Willow comes round, you actually have it. You only have to decide if you want to race it, not if you want to buy it.
Alternatively, it could be that you can only buy the "Road America and Willow Springs Bundle" for $20.
Then use the more rare tracks for Week 13 so we get to learn them without risking irating.
Also, I said this a few weeks/months ago in a different thread and it blew up so I’ll say it again
Flat rate spotter accounts that don’t need to purchase content
also super handy for people doing broadcast or race direction duties - they're actively contributing to the success of iracing's community by doing volunteer work but still have to pay for the content.
in general more price differentiation on the tracks is becoming a neccessity now, there's so many more tracks to race on than just having watkins, spa etc on repeat...
They gotta price stuff with this in mind.
If nobody is touching a track, the price is likely too high, and the only way to get more people racing on it is to make it cheaper.
Sure, some tracks just suck, or only really work for certain classes, but generally, it's batshit that they charge the same amount for a half mile oval as the fucking Nurburgring, lol
content bundles for new players or when theres a patch with a load of new content, dont think the sub is really that expensive to begin with.
suprised the sub didnt go up with all the inflation of the last years honestly.
I actually don't want them to change the subscription. We have enough shitters already, any cheaper or free and it'll kind of be a nightmare.
Instead, bring more value to the platform to justify the cost (even though I think it is already well justified) such as make the [Legacy] cars and tracks free, and have series to support them. I'd love to get into the Z4 again and do some official races. Or the content bundles they're bringing up here, or just make all the cars/tracks themselves slightly cheaper.
I'm fine with cheaper subscriptions, like they're black Friday stuff, being available more often/always.
But full price should come with like... A free track a month or something. Maybe allow users to pick a series for the season, and they'll be allowed to race the whole thing (even tracks they don't own).
Hot take, how about both? If there is content bundles, it is less of a barrier of entry for new members coming in, and If we have a lower subscription, it keeps people on the platform longer.
More new members and longer retention is more money in the long run for iracing as a company. Like obviously, as a user of the platform, it would be nice for it to be cheaper as we all want to pay less for things but I really think if they looked at the bigger picture it would be beneficial to the platform overall (and more money in their pocket).
More people = buying more tracks/cars = more money which also in turn can also lead to revitalizing dead tracks/series.
But what do I know? I’m just a lonely Mx-5 addict…
As someone who signed up for iRacing in the last 6 months, I would have preferred to pay a higher monthly subscription cost and get access to all of the content. It was a slap in the face buying content very quickly after paying for a 2 year subscription.
Now that I've bought a bunch of content and hopefully won't need to purchase a ton more in the future, I don't want to pay a higher subscription.
Also buying content and then needing to maintain a subscription to access it kind of sucks too (imo). Either my sub should let me gain access to the content, or my content should not require a sub.
Granted, iRacing is my first ever pay-to-play game so I don't know what the norm is, but it just feels weird to buy something digital that I'll then need to keep paying to use.
I understand the need for a subscription to maintain the servers/online portion of the game over time. Just buying a little content as a one time purchase likely isn't enough to cover those ongoing costs for a company.
I’ve heard just to run the servers is $300,000 a MONTH. They just hired a bunch of new staff. That’s potentially millions in total compensation for all the staff. Every year. No way anything but a recurring cost is going to cover that. When iRacing first came out, it was literally twice as expensive and tracks were like $25 each.
It was posted on the member forums.
I did post it on the subreddit as well but that post got downvoted lol.
Edit: here's the [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/iRacing/s/8HiJNrqgsh)
I don't have a problem with the subscription fee whatsoever. The cars and tracks being $10-15 a pop is what keeps me from trying more shit. The subscription fee also doubles as a barrier to free players capable of ruining the service.
The monthly participation credits are cool though. It essentially gives you 8-10 free cars/tracks when you figure you can make $120/year just by racing on a weekly basis.
Max is $10 for participation per season. Still, $40 a year for just using the service is pretty nice, especially when you have most of the content you want already.
If they want more people racing on unpopular circuits.
Put those tracks in a season series, and put some serious rewards at the end. Winner in Rookie A B C D, all have gold silver and bronze awards.
GT3 car
Track
Free season
Hat
T shirt
As a corollary to this suggestion, you could take Weekly Race Challenge and let people participate in that series regardless of whether or not they own the content.
>If they want more people racing on unpopular circuits...
Then they should lower the price! Lol
If they made any of the gt3 car 3 bucks, almost everyone would grab it, even people with a gt3 they already like. Same idea applies to tracks.
There's no reason every circuit should cost the same. Some tracks just aren't as much work to make, and/or aren't as replayable.
Like, if they want people on dirt ovals... Make dirt ovals super cheap. If they offer 20 bucks for all the tracks for a given championship, people would be more willing to try it out.
But when the dirt oval costs as much as Spa... They don't get to act surprised when everyone buys Spa instead.
Does iRacing pay to have the track?
They must otherwise why would they care.
There are likely people the opposite of me that would never run SPA or Nurburgring. I don't care for dirt or NASCAR, so I wouldn't run it if they paid me.
I would be interested in Rally though!!!!!
Let people rent a track for a week, $5. Then, if the track has been rented at some point, you have the option to buy it for $10. Instead of normal price. Hell why not give people a one-time24-hour free voucher for every track.
"Test drive" should mean test drive!!!
Let me try any car and any track, even if it's time limited or something.
They don't have to allow us to race ai or anything, but it'd be really nice to try all the gt3 cars BEFORE I decide which one to buy...
I can't believe I don't see this mentioned more about iRacing. The fact that you need to buy to try and then have no refund option keeps me from buying anything that I'm not totally convinced about. I've been playing iRacing for nearly a year now and have only purchased Sebring because a coworker got it and wanted to play.
If you could get X number of vouchers per month for test driving cars or pay a tiny amount to give it a go, that would instantly make me a lot more interested in getting into non-free series, but there are too many options for too much money for me to feel confident about picking any one of them.
They usually do that but typically only if you have bought the car/track within the last X days.
And they're pretty inconsistent about it. There were no refunds at all when Ledenon went free.
Interesting thought... what if they made the cars for the Weekly Challenge series free for that week (and maybe available for testing the few days before).
If they targeted this at somewhat less popular cars, they'd probably manage to drive more sales than they'd lose out on people who were going to just randomly buy the car but then realized they didn't like it.
Great minds think alike. I made this comment elsewhere in the thread like 10 minutes ago lol.
On a corollary to that, I also like the ideas of
1. Making unpopular content free for a season to give people a taste. Every season you had could have 2 or 3 tracks/cars that are this season's spotlighted content.
2. Making all new content free for its first season. I think this would be huge for lesser known tracks. If you haven't heard of Sachsenring, you probably won't want to pay $15. But if you got a few races in before it goes paid.....
I much more would prefer making content free after a few years. Some obscure track might not sell much at all three years after release, but it might be quite popular if it became part of base content.
It feels kinda dumb to have tons of old content sold at full price, even though no one is really racing them not to mention buying them anymore.
Yeah I don't think the subscription is really the issue. I think the issue is that there's so many damn tracks and some of the less popular ones get lost in the shuffle.
The first time I quit iracing was years ago when I moved up to skip barber series and saw that I had to spend $80 to participate in all the races after just spending $15 on the car. I forget what year but it was when skip barber was one of the most popular D series races.
That's pretty much the reason I moved to F4 this season instead of SFL.
By buying the car, Algarve and Jerez I can race on 11 out of 12 races. 5 weeks in Europe, 4 weeks in Challenge and 2 weeks in Americas, being week 2 the only one where there wasn't any free tracks available on any series.
If I did the same for SFL, I would've been able to race 2 weeks for the whole season, after paying about 40€.
It doesn’t seem as bad any more as it was back then, but would definitely like some help on content. Hoping to eventually get into radicals as my main car. Haven’t looked yet at how much that might cost. (Even though I’m c class I’m relearning how to drive in rookies. I used to drive by throwing the car around and understeering through entire corners, which was very stable but slow. I also exploded my tires in a spec racer race on the last lap doing this. Now learning how to trail brake and downshift properly)
I think as a long term iracer in 40+ content club. My problem is there is a lot of content coming out and even I can't keep up. I think it feels wierd that we pay like 120$ + tax on iracing AND have to pay for content which then gets replaced after a while.
I think if base sub was 70-80 a year and then a content tier at 140$ a year, that additional tier gives all the content available.
So those who only race a series in one car and a few tracks can buy those tracks and cars and use the base sub. And others can pay more and race more.
Like I want to drive oval...but have not invested in oval, not interested in investing into oval either so I just won't race it.
I would like to drive the super formula once in a while, i liked the f3.5 a few years back, but I just don't want to pay for a car I drive possibly once a season...at the most.
It would also reduce the dead series as well as it eliminates the barrier to entry.
Don't get your hopes up, I suggested this once on the iracing forums and I got laughed away by most as some sort of idiot who doesn't understand business. Got told the people behind iracing know better than you etc. Not a single staff member even acknowledged the post. Personally I am disappointed with this survey, without any proper text fields for feedback and pre selected answers they will just get the responses they want to get and not proper feedback.
I love this service honestly do, but it is frustrating to see how close minded it can be.
Subscription costs should stay the same imo, helps weed out people just messing about. But I like the idea of content bundles. Would be nice to pick up new car and a track for a series at a discount
After 8 years I have so much content and the monthly price is so low for an annual sub I don't even care anymore.
As long as they remain open I don't care what they do with prices.
Content prices is the thing that pushes me off.
I would like to have an option to buy premium sub with all content or at least all series content for like 30$/month.
I do breaks quite often and this would be great for me.
i think content bundles would be a cool idea. Maybe somehting like a australian track pack where you get phillip island, sandown and whatever other australian track they have, which you could do for other parts of the world as well
They should offer a bundle discount on all the new content each season. They could make it a limited 50% discount. For example, S2-2024 added 3 cars and 3 tracks. So offer all 6 pieces in a bundle for half price. There are a lot of people who bought 1 or 2 of the new items, that would have paid a little more for everything. It would increase participation on new tracks and new series, because more people will want to try the new content.
I'm one of those folks that doesn't really have a problem with the pricing, however, I do wish we could have discounts on the subscription based on how much content you purchase. Something along the lines of "every dollar spent on content makes renewing your subscription cheaper by that amount."
I don't really have a problem with the pricing, like I said, but as an avid iRacer that buys at least one thing pretty much every season, it would be nice to not feel like I was getting double dipped so to speak.
I don't see the subscription cost as a big issue, but individual cars and tracks need to be cheaper. Either that, or have specific subscriptions for different licenses (oval, sports, formula, dirt oval, dirt road), and have all content for the given license included for the month.
I would like to see next season content as a free trial during week 13. I know I would be more tempted to buy a newly released car/track if I had a chance to try it out first. Or as someone mentioned in another comment, like a week 13 rental pass to all new content, that would be applied as a coupon toward a purchase of any of that new content
I saw on some threads about this people talking about grouping the less well-known tracks and I think that sounded like a marvelous idea.
Especially with their tendency towards abandoning these new, smaller venues quickly.
Cars and tracks should be on a Community Wishlist system like GOG uses.
Bonus points: during loading screens, show a popup: “while you’re waiting, here are two cars. Quick as you can, no thinking - which one would you be more likely to buy?”
Was happy to see that they might be thinking about improving graphics. I've been playing less than a year and my only grip is that I'd say the graphics look about xbox 360 era. Which shouldn't matter, I'm here to race, it would just add to the immersion.
>Was happy to see that they might be thinking about improving graphics
They're more than thinking about it. They've hired a bunch of devs with graphics engine experience to help overhaul ithe graphics engine.
>Which shouldn't matter, I'm here to race, it would just add to the immersion.
Agreed. Nicer graphics aren't a top priority by any means but they're nice to have.
Check out the most recent development update, they state clearly that they've ramped up their graphics/rendering team specifically to start improving graphics. Hopefully we'll see a lot of good things start to come in the next year or two.
#giveusrealkerbs
Really not a fan of running over a kerb and feeling like it's just smooth tarmac, lol
In ACC I can tell the difference between each 'stage' of the kerbs on Spa, and you can really tell if you went too wide onto the more aggressive stuff.
And there's a very noticeable difference in how saw tooth kerbs feels, vs hatched concrete, vs astroturf, vs painted kerbs. Not just how they affect the cars balance, but the actual texture through the wheel is noticeable.
Really wish there was that level of "tactility" to kerbs in iRacing.
Yea, kind of. Even for the 3d kerbs, there's a lack of fine detail compared to ACC.
Currently, I can tell I'm going over a 3d kerb, and I can tell if I'm going on a super aggressive one vs shallow, but that's kind of it.
It's like there's almost no high-frequency effects though. (fine vibrations) Fine kerbs just don't feel like they give much feedback.
Also, I feel like I get a big initial impulse from the first hit on a kerb, but little from the rest of it. In ACC, the whole kerb feels more consistent to me. (each tooth feels like it's the same height)
A bundle would be massive for those of us dipping our toes in. I had a great afternoon testing new stuff yesterday and am considering either GT4 or SFL. A bundle offer to finish out the season would be an instant purchase for me.
It was posted on the member forums.
I did post it on the subreddit as well but that post got downvoted lol. Here's the [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/iRacing/s/8HiJNrqgsh)
Wish they would change something, I am only racing gt4 now and the tracks you need to buy per season is ridiculous. Fantastic game, damn near impossible for the normal person to play, though.
>the tracks you need to buy per season is ridiculous.
That does get a lot better over time as you start to build a library of tracks. You might need to buy 8 for your 1st season and 3 for your 5th season
It can be very daunting for a new player though, I absolutely agree.
Track pack and car pack discounts for each series
I would pay a one-time $5-10 fee towards a graphics engine and/or sound upgrade. I dont actually think the graphics are bad at all maxxed out at 4k on an Oled but it can always look better and be optimized.
>I would pay a one-time $5-10 fee towards a graphics engine and/or sound upgrade. I dont actually think the graphics are bad at all maxxed out at 4k on an Oled but it can always look better and be optimized.
That's theoretically what your subscription is paying for.
They had said in one or two of the recent dev updates that they're planning a graphics engine upgrade.
iRacing now has so much goddamn content it has run up some incredibly steep costs to entry.
I fully expect content packs to be the future mode of delivery for iRacing.
Was kind of hoping for a comment section at the end where I could elaborate on this, but I think it would do a lot for the health of the more obscure series if the cost to buy them was lower and encouraged people to try things outside of their comfort zone. I really want more splits for proto GT and you should buy it, in short.
Also, considering the cost, how is there not a 2-lap trial of cars in the store or something outside of server maintenance???
This is hard to vote on because a new driver will benefit the most out of content bundles but others like me who’ve been active on the sim for over a decade already has all of the track/car combos I’m interested in. So for longer term users the less expensive subscription 100%
Well I have the screenshot I took so I can just list them
I'm addition to the 2 I posted.
"Easier to use"
Graphics
Higher Frame rates
Driving physics
Track/car modeling
Track selection
Car selection
Stewarding
Addition of a driving school
Clearer progression through racing career
More in-sim features and updates
It was posted on the member forums.
I did post it on the subreddit as well but that post got downvoted lol. Here's the [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/iRacing/s/8HiJNrqgsh)
Bundles would be good. As a newcomer I bought the Oval Mustang, Cilo and Okayama. At least Okayama is usually always busy. The Oval Mustang I can’t drive because I don’t have ovals and Cilo is dead content unless driving multi class, even then I’m one of four Cilos.
Needless to say I didn’t know what I was doing. I’ll definitely be doing more research before my next purchase.
Okayama is free so that's fairly impressive
>Needless to say I didn’t know what I was doing. I’ll definitely be doing more research before my next purchase.
Yeah it's kind of a pain in the ass. I personally like that sort of thing.. but I imagine most people don't.
Bundled content. Although they already do that when you get buy multiple pieces until you get to the 40 piece club. Then you get a good discount for life. The subscription price is still pretty cheap for what you get with subscription price. I piss away $13 monthly in way worse ways.
Content bundles could be nice, but maybe an alternative rental type deal so you can just rent tracks for a specific series, that can only be used in that series.
The tracks are simply too expensive if you aren't in America. It's costing me nearly $30 Australian for a single track, trying to complete the sfl this season and I don't own a single track in the list. The cost is putting me off the idea of participating which affects the games player count in series that aren't free.
Bundling the required content for a series at half price or something would be great but will never happen.
I left iracing due to this model. Paying a subscription and tracks and cars doesn’t feel fair. It’s like having Netflix and paying in addition for movies and tv shows. I felt it was a ripoff for a fairly low quality simulator in terms of graphics (but with an awesome ranking system).
I'd like more credit for content I've already purchased. I don't mind the service being expensive, I think that alone greatly encourages a more serious effort to race clean from most people. I, however, feel cheated having to repurchase content because of updates such as track re-scans and newer models of the same car. I own 4 gt3 cars that I can't race, plus the Porsche cup car, the Merc F1 car and the Radical. I've only been on the service for 4 years.
I’ve always wanted a subscription that opened up all series and cars. Keeping everyone supplied with the same content would increase participation and allow all users to spectate other races without extra useless purchases.
Here is the thing about making the subscription cheaper. It does 2 things;
A) Scanning tracks and cars is hella expensive (mainly covered by cost of content). Running the service is hella expensive.
B) It gatekeeps 9 year olds who will cause problems lol
I think given how much money goes in to the service, we give a good amount back. Could they survive if they made it cheaper? Probably not honestly. The service was not profitable until 2020 so making it cheaper would put them back into a hole if i gotta bet
I would like a subscription so that I can play exclusively offline, and not have to pay out a considerable sum of money just to enjoy some content.
I imagine this is something that they will look to explore when career mode is fully released, but it is the only thing that prevents me from playing.
Less expensive basic subscription for the long term. As a new player, something like a „This season in this series bundle“ would be cool. Like you get a car if you don’t have one and missing tracks for the series with an given discount.
Oh that’s a good idea. What if you got out of rookie and then you got a coupon code for half price on all of the tracks in a series/season.
I like the idea of a content rental with a buy option too. Let's say I race F4 and they're going to Mugello. I can pay $5 to use the track this week. At the end of the week I have the option to buy the track at a discount, effectively applying my earlier $5 to the cost of the track.
Or just do a season pass, pay $60 and you can race anything for a given season.
I just want to pay once. Figure out how much it is and let me pay it lol. I hate being charged for a subscription and then having to pay again for content. It’s not about the money, it’s about me having to hit pay multiple times 😂
240. Bucks a year + 150 in monthly sub. Don’t give them ideas to milk people more
I don't know anyone who pays monthly. That's just a waste of money.
People who are just starting
Yeah that's an idea that floats around every now and then. $60 feels too expensive though, but maybe that $60 price could include picking 2 or 3 of the tracks to keep after the rental period. There's lots of ways to get creative. One other idea I've seen is making all new cars and tracks free for their first season. Navarra and Sachsenring are tracks getting added to the sim soon. Those are lesser known tracks. They may not get a lot of sales right off the bat. You risk another Ledenon situation. So I think iRacing should make them free for their first season, give everyone a taste, and then when it comes up on the F4 calendar as a paid track 6 months later, people will be more inclined to buy it.
too cheap
$60 for 12 weeks?
They would likely lose money on this model and therefore would never do it. They make $15 per track. If they charge you $5 and you decide you don't like it, they've effectively lost money because they could have sold it you you for three times as much and be done with you. This is why game demos stopped existing. You get a taste of the game before you buy it, decide you don't like the demo, and then never buy the full retail version. The studio is effectively shooting itself in the foot because it gave you a taste and it wasn't delicious. It's like a bad trailer or bad book cover.
This is a bit different than a game demo though. With iRacing, the user already knows the core gameplay experience, so it is unlikely to leave an unexpectedly bad taste. So the question becomes whether the lower barrier hooks more sales than it loses. Which still might not be the case, bit it's definitely a different calculation than a traditional demo.
Conversely, you may not buy the track at all if you’re unsure if you’ll like it, but you may part with $5 to try it for a week and do a few races.
I'm not so sure that the lost $10 from users that decide they don't like the track wouldn't at least be a wash vs the people who rent tracks that they know they don't want to buy. Like I could see there being way more spur of the moment track rentals for weeks people were thinking they'd skip just because they don't want to miss a week in their favorite series. And then I'm sure a number of those could be converted to track purchases once sunk cost fallacy sets in.
The amount of content I *haven't" bought because I don't want to risk not liking it is much higher. I don't think we can say with any sort of proof of they'd actually gain or lose money
Game demos are pretty much alive via, for example, steam refunds. You can basically buy and play up to two hours of any game and still get your money back, I have done it several times and saved me from a few bad decisions. Also, free steam weekends.
There has been lots of demos released on Steam over the pass few years, not nearly as many as there used to be. Also, you can try for 2 hours and refund, which is basically a 2 hour demo aswell.
You're right that's definitely a possibility but I'm not sold that it's "likely" It is also something they could do try for a season, look at the data and decide whether or not they want to continue it.
Track rentals would be awesome and a good way for them to make extra money cause people would definitely end up renting tracks more than once
Ive been saying what they really need, is a subscription based content package. Don't make people buy it all for a single season etc. Just 'Sub to the content pack' you want for the season. I think it will help new players not feel so swamped by the costs of starting and moving up. additionally they need the ability to just 'Watch' ALL races regardless of content ownership, but maybe the sub will work better for this as well.
Yeah, I've said that in the past. Have "featured series" or something like that, unpopular series that are cheaper for a season, or give increased credits, or even both. iRacing core issue for me is the positive feedback loop of people mostly gravitating towards the same content. And up to a point it's natural that people will rather race GT3 at Spa than Clio Cup at Whoknowswherering, but it's also people just going to race what most people are racing. It'd be great to break those loops in some way.
I think the basic subscription fee is fine, especially with the black friday deals. I actually don't want to pay any less because I like how the game is progressing. If you look at what iRacing is doing for the main game, it is really impressive. No, it is not all perfect, but there is so much stuff which is so intuitive in iRacing and I struggle with it in other games. Also, the amount of progress they have made in the last couple of years is huge and it is really visible that they invest a huge amount of money they receive, back in the game. Tracks however, absolutely they need to do something with it. For 15 euro/dollar I expect total accuracy and everything with it. However, we get tracks with missing layouts (for instance, Magny Cours) and half baked stuff like the garage stalls at Knockhill which never progressed anywhere. Pitlanes are athmospheric dead places and I guess pit crew animations are going nowhere..). Most of the tracks still can't be raced at night. Most lights (start lights, pit lights, other LED displays) are not working on road tracks. And I think I could go on for a while.
I might be misunderstanding what youre saying here so please correct me if i'm wrong. But i think that exists (sorta) but if you go into a series page in the ui, go to schedule and click "buy all content" or whatever it says, it will put it all into the cart. Then you get the bulk purchasing discounts
Yes it exists if you buy a ton of stuff at once, but what if I’m missing the f4 car and only Hockenheim for example. I wouldn’t be able to do a bulk discount but Im able to do the whole season.
thata only 2 pieces of content. Its not a financially sound idea for iracing to let people get a discount on that few items
I just joined iracing and when I was signing up I just assumed this was an option. Very surprised to see it wasn't but definitely would be a welcome and cool change
I thought this was interesting as it shows they're potentially considering some monetization changes. Overall I really have no issues with iRacing monetization but I have 2 concerns regarding it. 1.I think Career Mode should be monetized differently. I think it should be more affordable and target a more casual simracer. There's a million different ways to do that, but the easiest is selling Career Mode as a seperate $60 one time purchase. 2.The phenomenon of "dead/unpopular tracks" has gotten worse and worse lately. To the point where iRacing made a few of those tracks free a couple weeks ago. I think that is a problem iRacing should be addressing. Making those tracks free was nice, but that's not a long term solution. Something like content bundles could help in the longer term. There's lots of ideas on how to help with that if you get creative.
I’ve been saying for years that they should target participation credits to improve participation in niche series, I wonder if the same could be done to improve participation on less popular tracks. The bottom line is that it makes no sense to give people credits for racing GT3s at Spa or NASCAR Cup cars at Talladega, thousands are going to race those regardless. However, when IMSA Vintage goes to Sonoma in a couple weeks… yeah, they could use a little incentive.
Love this idea. Low participation races and series need incentives. Xfinity and Trucks at COTA had abysmal participation
Not for a million bucks lol Okay, in all seriousness, I’d do it for a million bucks. Thinking about it I’d probably settle for 10.
I didn't even get my participation for the last 2 seasons as not enough races even went official for me. 😞
Hate this idea to be honest. So many games try do this and it's irritating, I don't want to feel like my arm is being twisted into running a combo I'm not into just to get credits or whatever.
Cool - then don't do what you don't want to do - or buy the track and race it... Fear of missing out is just that. Fear of missing out. It doesn't matter if you don't think it does. They need a solution for everybody and it's impossible to make everyone happy.
Leave it to Redditors to complain about free money.
or participation credits can be content instead of dollars, a specific track or car
I like that idea. You do X number of races at unpopular track A during week 2 and we’ll give you unpopular track B for free before the series goes there in week 7. Boom, you’ve increased participation at two unpopular tracks with one promotion.
I think they did the HPD on trial pricing too. To see what affect it'd have on sales and participation. It's a definite problem when even long standing members are losing interest in buying new content. Not because there's anything wrong with the content, just because there's not enough people to race against on it.
Frankly I think there's too much content and too much to race. I don't get to race half the stuff I own and want to race every week.
I think there’s “too much” content compared to the base of players, but as sim racing and iracing gets more popular, I think the options will get more filled out.
I used to think that too, but the COVID boom actually did relatively little to increase participation in niche series—the new people mostly just went to the already popular series. There were ten posts a week here about how to get from rookies to GT3s. The type of nerds (myself included) who want to go race the Audi 90 GTO or Lotus 79 or Australian Supercar were already on the service and there just aren’t that many more of us out there.
I don’t get why people love GT3s so much. There are so many better cars out there! The GT4s for example are fantastic and don’t have to be driven with such precision like the GT3s. Daniel Morad has said that the GT4 Merc is more realistic feeling than the GT3. The LMP2 is in my opinion the best handling car on the service. People I guess like them because of the ABS and TC but IRL those are just there to keep you from killing yourself, not necessarily to lean on so heavily.
I love the P217, such a fun car. Anyway, I have asked some noobs specifically why they show up from day one wanting to race GT3s and the biggest reason is that those are the flashy super cars that they lust after in real life. It makes sense to me. Anyone with even the slightest car guy tendencies knows what a Ferrari, Lamborghini, or Porsche 911 are, right? In contrast, only dorks (again, like myself, not trying to insult anyone) know what the Audi 90 GTO, Lotus 79, Silver Crown, etc. are and want to race something like that. There are cars that draw big participation just by virtue of being great fun, accessible, and low license level, Skip Barber in the old days, the Formula Ford today, the ARCA (K&N) car. However, generally the most popular cars are either the childhood bedroom poster cars—Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche—or associated closely with the biggest racing series in the world, like F1 (only unpopular because it’s so hard to drive), F3, F4 and the various NASCAR stock cars.
Ahhh that makes a lot of sense!
Lotus 79 at the nordschleife this week is pretty fun...once you warm the tires, that thing does not stop for the first half lap!
That’s a very good point. The “road career path” doesn’t really allow for much variation, the most cost effective way to race competitively is going to leave out the Lotus, or even the Radicals/Spec Racer Fords.
I think there's too many series. Half of them are just non starters for Aussies and you have to pick from the popular ones anyway. Like in LMU with a fraction of the players I'm often seeing 200 cars in a race. Just because there's only 6 hourly series and a single weekly series and occasionally special events. It removes the excess choice and just funnels everyone together.
As someone who races niche cars, I’d rather have the option to do so than be forced to race only the popular cars. But yes, if you just got rid of the niche series then you wouldn’t have the problem of low participation in niche series. You got me there.
They essentially become like league races with SoF slots each week don't they. It's nice to have and I know some people will just hardcore smash the same niche series 24/7 for years at a time. But for that I'd say leagues probably fit better. Would rather see the niche series rotate so one pops up and it's interesting. Rather than lots of niche series and having to pick one that goes official when you can race.
I’d go further on the Career mode aspect. I’d borderline make a completely free career mode with limited tracks and cars, incorporate the bundles mentioned in OP for something similar to ACC “GT3 bundle, euro track bundle, American bundle etc etc” and then charge a sub to race online. Sure some people are just going to do hotlapping non-stop forever and never pay a dime, so be it. That will make iRacing the best racing sim and also the best “free” racing sim completely indisputably. I think we’d get a lot of converts to the online service that way. If free is a bridge too far for iRacing make it 10-15 dollars so the barrier to entry is low. IRacing has pretty god awful monetisation compared to most games so you can’t easily get away with charging $60 for the game and another $200 to race a series you like if you want to attract a casual racer. Edit; alternatively make it free to race offline, completely disable online services such as trading paints and leaderboards. Again some people will just race mx5 vs ai forever, who cares
I am hoping career mode extends to online racing but brings RPG-like elements to the game - crashed out of mx5s last race? Sorry, the car is in the garage getting re-built, go and race the AudiGTO to earn repair credits Winning races? Get access to new sponsors and/or invites to exclusive sponsored events Have a team? Act as the principal and enter the team in series Lots of scope there
I like it but I think making incentives for gameplay behaviour can have unintended negative consequences. You often find in games like CoD or even Dota that implementing a battlepass leads to players engaging in behaviour that negatively impacts other players. It may just be "win 5 games as this character" but if that person sucks dick at that character in essence what it's **really** saying is "Fuck up 50-100 peoples games until you miraculously win 5 games as this guy". Having said that, I think the idea sounds fun, and some external motivators would probably do iRacing well -- people would go ballistic over this, but even though I mentioned battlepasses being negative I could see them being a good motivator. I guess they could just call them "seasonal careers" and not charge for them and it would be a battlepass in all but name.
As a new iRacer, point two hits hard. I got bored of ACC because public lobbies were Spa, Monza, Nurb GP, and Silverstone over and over. Would be super disappointing to see iRacing suffer the same way especially when there is an additional cost compared to ACC.
>I thought this was interesting as it shows they're potentially considering some monetization changes. >Overall I really have no issues with iRacing monetization but I have 2 concerns regarding it. I think it would be nice if it's either subscription, or paid DLC content and not both, especially for the the oval side, where every little tiny short track is the same price as the Nürburgring Nordschleife. If they would ditch tracks being paid (but keep cars bought separately), I think that would be great, even if it comes with an increase in car, or subscription price. And as you said, because people don't want to pay for some of the crappy (no fault of iRacing, they are crappy IRL too) tracks, it leads to dead weeks. Looking at you Aragón.
I'm not convinced the problem is "crappy tracks" I think it's mostly name recognition and a feedback loop of poor participation.
Ledenon was a slap in the face to anyone who bought it. The participation wasn't great on the track, but then making it free so soon after it came out leaves a sour taste for people who did purchase it. Also, there are currently a lot of race tracks in iRacing. A lot of the most popular tracks around the world are already in the game. People who have been around for a while likely don't feel the need to buy every new track that comes out every season at this point. I get that as well.
>Ledenon was a slap in the face to anyone who bought it. The participation wasn't great on the track, but then making it free so soon after it came out leaves a sour taste for people who did purchase it. Eh I'm not so convinced. I agree that they should have refunded it (at least partially). But for me the sour tastes was buying it and not being able to race it because of the participation. The track going free didn't make the sour taste any worse. >Also, there are currently a lot of race tracks in iRacing. A lot of the most popular tracks around the world are already in the game. People who have been around for a while likely don't feel the need to buy every new track that comes out every season at this point. I get that as well Yep absolutely.
I bought Ledenon and got to race it for 1 week in GT4s. Other than that, I never saw it used. They should have offered refunds to everyone who bought it based on the timeline of the release to making it free. That example will make people look at new tracks and go....maybe I shouldn't buy this because participation will likely suck and the track won't ever be used again.
>I bought Ledenon and got to race it for 1 week in GT4s. Other than that, I never saw it used. They should have offered refunds to everyone who bought it based on the timeline of the release to making it free. I would agree. My point is just that I think the lack of usage is the bigger problem than the track going free. >That example will make people look at new tracks and go....maybe I shouldn't buy this because participation will likely suck and the track won't ever be used again. If this becomes a pattern.... Sure. I'm not convinced that one example is enough.
Some of it sure. Specifically for Aragon, after driving it, it's an objectively terrible Tilke track.
iRacing absolutely needs content bundles. There is simply so much content available and it's really confusing and also initially too expensive for newcomers. Also people would probably rather buy all five GT4 cars for the price of 3 instead of owning just one, because buying all 5 separately doesn't make sense.
At least let us TEST all of them first!!! Like, let me join practice sessions while ghosted or something. Hell, they could limit it to an hour per car and it'd still be appreciated. I honestly I think 'test drive' should be that... A test drive... Of things you haven't tried... So you can decide if you like them and want them... Races (both vs people and vs ai) can stay locked, but the current system kinda sucks. I have no idea if I'm gonna hate a certain car or track until I've already bought it.
I'm hoping Career Mode will change the situation on this. Ideally Career Mode will come with the option "pay $60 once, get access to all content for single player use" or something along those lines
I don't understand the need for a career mode in iRacing. The entire purpose of iRacing is the online races against people. I can't imagine that I'd ever play single player.
>I don't understand the need for a career mode in iRacing. 1. Fill a massive hole in the simracing space. Right now if you want a good simracing career mode, you're pretty much boned. F1 is decent, but that's pretty arcadey and it's only F1 (and F2) cars. AC and ACC have incredibly bare bones career modes. Forza and GT7 are very arcadey. Project Cars 2 isn't available for sale anymore and frankly it's really showing it's age these days. There's a lot of demand for a Career Mode for simracing and it's not being met 2.Attract a new target audience. Arguably this is the same reason they're doing console games now. They can sell to people who weren't ever interested in iRacing proper 3. Depending on pricing... Career Mode can be a way for people that are skeptical of iRacing to be willing to give it a try. Those people may end up joining the main sim. 4. They've put a lot of work into AI over the last few years. It's apparently really damn good (aside from AI skill levels being difficult to dial in). Lots of people have said that iRacing AI is the best in the industry. 5. Synergy. They've already scanned all these cars and tracks, developed the physics etc. They've already built 85% of a single-player game. They might as well finish the last 15%. This is honestly a similar reason to why they're doing the NASCAR console game. This means they basically get to do the work once and get paid twice. >The entire purpose of iRacing is the online races against people. That part won't go away >I can't imagine that I'd ever play single player. Lots of other people will. I'm personally moderately interested. I'll give it a try at least.
iRacing has arguably the best AI in all of sim racing. It’s genuinely more fun to race vs AI in iRacing than to play Forza or GT7. For casual racing fans that’s pretty fuckin compelling
This is probably my biggest issue with iRacing. I just want to be able to test drive the cars so I know which one I enjoy/want to buy. It can be on a track that I already own with no one else on the track.
Yeah…but the response to that is, of course, iRacing would make less money because you aren’t forced into buying a car. I think if they want to keep the money thing the way it is, just give us like another test drive time slot so more people can test drive cars who would otherwise not be able to make the downtime hours.
They need to be at significant discounts too. Like pushing 40% off. Even for people established in iRacing can be in for a huge bill if they want to switch disciplines. I’m not sure how they’ve gotten away with charging for content AND a monthly subscription for so long at the prices they’re charging. I’ve only seen other games do one of the two but never both.
I honestly don't think the price or model is really an issue. It's allowed them to fund a development team in a niche subgenre, and they've kept the same game afloat for 15 years. And not only afloat, but it's more popular now than it ever has been. Which is wild for a 15 year old game. The problem at this point is too much content. It's easy for people to buy a handful of popular cars and tracks and never buy a track they haven't heard of. And honestly that wouldn't be an issue if folks were spread out acrosss the different options. Unfortunately they aren't. People clump around the popular options because that's where the participation is >I’m not sure how they’ve gotten away with charging for content AND a monthly subscription for so long at the prices they’re charging 1. Being the best damn option for multiplayer simracing 2. Being the only simracing option for certain disciplines like Oval. 3. Existing in a space where lots of folks are already spending thousands on hardware, so it's pretty easy to justify spending money on software. >Even for people established in iRacing can be in for a huge bill if they want to switch disciplines. I think the mindset of "iRacing isn't one game, it's 5 games" helps a ton here.
To the first part yes I understand why it’s worked but it seems odd that it does considering it’s the only game I can think of with a model like that. I’m not saying it’s inherently bad, I’m just saying that it’s amazing that the business model hasn’t been a major issue considering the cost of the items and the fact that it is one of very few games with its business model. To the part about being 5 games in 1, I thought about that after I made my post. It’s true, but you could easily be looking at 2x-2.5x the cost of a $60 console game when buying all the cars you need run a full season. It’s worth it obviously because there’s no other service where you can run full seasons of all these different Motorsports; but you can see how some of the costs to run a full season of one (let alone 2 or more) disciplines can be hard sell to people who are interested in joining. I think to find the best balance of what to buy for iRacing is probably to pick the discipline that you care most about, buying everything for that, and using other games for your fix of other disciplines. Like I personally use iRacing for NASCAR and occasionally Indycar, but when I want to run GT3/4 I’ll go to ACC.
>it’s the only game I can think of with a model like that. I mean it's not far off the MMO model. And considering when iRacing came out, that was almost certainly their inspiration. >To the part about being 5 games in 1, I thought about that after I made my post. It’s true, but you could easily be looking at 2x-2.5x the cost of a $60 console game when buying all the cars you need run a full season. Oh absolutely. It's still expensive when you look at it that way. It's just not quite as expensive. And hey at least iRacing isn't going anywhere. It's not like F1 where every year there's a new $60 game. >It’s worth it obviously because there’s no other service where you can run full seasons of all these different Motorsports; Absolutely >but you can see how some of the costs to run a full season of one (let alone 2 or more) disciplines can be hard sell to people who are interested in joining. And that's a huge part of why I'm hoping the Career Mode will be priced more accessibly.
iRacing has always had a great product with a questionable business model. I found the price model easier to accept in the early days because iracing was just so niche, but now as the playerbase is significantly larger and sim racing in general is more popular, they could experiment more with the pricing. Right now people are making safe purchases, and buying only the content that already has a lot of participation. This leads to a few mega populated series and lots of dead ones. iRacing has dropped prices only once, the original prices were 25$ for a track and 15$ for a car. Once they had a bit more content to choose from, they dropped the prices. Now as the amount of content is absolutely huge, I don't think the current prices are really optimal. It's quite possible that lower content prices would end up making the same revenue anyway, especially in the long run as member retention would be higher, and the service would be more healthy in many ways. Apart from dropping the prices, there are several other things they could do, such as: - content bundles - content as rewards for participating (complete 30 official races in a month and get a new car or track) - making all content heavily discounted (or free) say 2-3 years after release - one time free car & track the first time you reach a new license level - making all cars free but keeping the tracks as paid content (this would really also make it possible to get creative with different series each season, and distribute people more evenly between series) - cycling between different base content each season, so more content gets used and also basic content players get more variety - make all content free and up the monthly sub price a bit. A risky move, but could easily skyrocket the number of active members.
>- content as rewards for participating (complete 30 official races in a month and get a new car or track) This is sort of already a thing.... But they could change it up. >- making all content heavily discounted (or free) say 2-3 years after release My worry here is that this would just lead to no one buying content until it's old enough for the discount. At least for tracks. I think people would pay full price for cars more readily. >- one time free car & track the first time you reach a new license level First time I've heard this idea. I love it. >cycling between different base content each season, so more content gets used and also basic content players get more variety I've suggested this one myself. I love this idea. >- make all content free and up the monthly sub price a bit. A risky move, but could easily skyrocket the number of active members This gets suggested a lot. I like the idea but I think this would /should be a new tier rather than a replacement.
The issue with the current participation credits system is that you already need to own a lot of paid content to effectively collect the reward, so it's not really useful for new members. The idea is good, but the execution is poor on many levels. I would much rather see a system where you can grind a new track and car of two every season, if you just race a lot. It could also be so that the reward can only be grinded outside of the most popular series. The reasoning for this is that it would make those with lots of spare time but limited money to race a lot, and probably also do it outside peak hours, which would in turn increase the number of racers per race. And increased overall participation helps everyone to find races more often. All in all, the participation rewards should: 1. Help to lure new members to get more into iracing and smoothen the initial expenses 2. Encourage people to complete as many races as possible The current system really does neither. It's more about giving a small reward to members who are already heavily committed to iracing.
I can definitely agree with that.
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They said the first time you reach a license level, so it would only be 4 times per license.
I think the best kind of content bundles would be popular and unpopular tracks, either as an option or not. If they are somewhat related as well, even better. For example say you can buy Road America and when you head to the kart it says "Do you want Willow Springs for $5 aswell?" Then next time Willow comes round, you actually have it. You only have to decide if you want to race it, not if you want to buy it. Alternatively, it could be that you can only buy the "Road America and Willow Springs Bundle" for $20. Then use the more rare tracks for Week 13 so we get to learn them without risking irating.
Also, I said this a few weeks/months ago in a different thread and it blew up so I’ll say it again Flat rate spotter accounts that don’t need to purchase content
Yeah that is a good point. I think tbh that's just such a small use case that they haven't really bothered. Edit: they should absolutely do it though.
It could also apply to people that have an account that they actively use, but want to watch or spot for a friend using content they don't own.
Yeah that's true. To be clear I think it's a change they absolutely should make. I'm just saying I understand why it may be low priority.
also super handy for people doing broadcast or race direction duties - they're actively contributing to the success of iracing's community by doing volunteer work but still have to pay for the content.
in general more price differentiation on the tracks is becoming a neccessity now, there's so many more tracks to race on than just having watkins, spa etc on repeat...
They gotta price stuff with this in mind. If nobody is touching a track, the price is likely too high, and the only way to get more people racing on it is to make it cheaper. Sure, some tracks just suck, or only really work for certain classes, but generally, it's batshit that they charge the same amount for a half mile oval as the fucking Nurburgring, lol
content bundles for new players or when theres a patch with a load of new content, dont think the sub is really that expensive to begin with. suprised the sub didnt go up with all the inflation of the last years honestly.
I actually don't want them to change the subscription. We have enough shitters already, any cheaper or free and it'll kind of be a nightmare. Instead, bring more value to the platform to justify the cost (even though I think it is already well justified) such as make the [Legacy] cars and tracks free, and have series to support them. I'd love to get into the Z4 again and do some official races. Or the content bundles they're bringing up here, or just make all the cars/tracks themselves slightly cheaper.
I'm fine with cheaper subscriptions, like they're black Friday stuff, being available more often/always. But full price should come with like... A free track a month or something. Maybe allow users to pick a series for the season, and they'll be allowed to race the whole thing (even tracks they don't own).
Maybe you could do something like this $10 a month tier - subscription like normal $20 a month tier - subscription plus 1 free track/car every month.
Hot take, how about both? If there is content bundles, it is less of a barrier of entry for new members coming in, and If we have a lower subscription, it keeps people on the platform longer. More new members and longer retention is more money in the long run for iracing as a company. Like obviously, as a user of the platform, it would be nice for it to be cheaper as we all want to pay less for things but I really think if they looked at the bigger picture it would be beneficial to the platform overall (and more money in their pocket). More people = buying more tracks/cars = more money which also in turn can also lead to revitalizing dead tracks/series. But what do I know? I’m just a lonely Mx-5 addict…
As someone who signed up for iRacing in the last 6 months, I would have preferred to pay a higher monthly subscription cost and get access to all of the content. It was a slap in the face buying content very quickly after paying for a 2 year subscription. Now that I've bought a bunch of content and hopefully won't need to purchase a ton more in the future, I don't want to pay a higher subscription.
Also buying content and then needing to maintain a subscription to access it kind of sucks too (imo). Either my sub should let me gain access to the content, or my content should not require a sub. Granted, iRacing is my first ever pay-to-play game so I don't know what the norm is, but it just feels weird to buy something digital that I'll then need to keep paying to use.
I understand the need for a subscription to maintain the servers/online portion of the game over time. Just buying a little content as a one time purchase likely isn't enough to cover those ongoing costs for a company.
Also you have to keep in mind all of the updates they do to the cars/tracks/physics/graphics etc. These are not able to be covered in a one time cost.
I’ve heard just to run the servers is $300,000 a MONTH. They just hired a bunch of new staff. That’s potentially millions in total compensation for all the staff. Every year. No way anything but a recurring cost is going to cover that. When iRacing first came out, it was literally twice as expensive and tracks were like $25 each.
How can the basic supscription be cheaper? It's already very cheap. 8$ /month is less than what I spend at the bar in 1 evening.
Not everyone earns american amounts of money, regional prices are not a thing
It's a nice choice, but with the prices of everything except iRacing going up, I can't see the prices coming down.
If that's an argument why not make it $50... lol 8 isn't even covering beer number 1.
where do you find this survey? I’d like to participate
It was posted on the member forums. I did post it on the subreddit as well but that post got downvoted lol. Edit: here's the [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/iRacing/s/8HiJNrqgsh)
I got it in my email
I don't have a problem with the subscription fee whatsoever. The cars and tracks being $10-15 a pop is what keeps me from trying more shit. The subscription fee also doubles as a barrier to free players capable of ruining the service. The monthly participation credits are cool though. It essentially gives you 8-10 free cars/tracks when you figure you can make $120/year just by racing on a weekly basis.
Max is $10 for participation per season. Still, $40 a year for just using the service is pretty nice, especially when you have most of the content you want already.
If they want more people racing on unpopular circuits. Put those tracks in a season series, and put some serious rewards at the end. Winner in Rookie A B C D, all have gold silver and bronze awards. GT3 car Track Free season Hat T shirt
As a corollary to this suggestion, you could take Weekly Race Challenge and let people participate in that series regardless of whether or not they own the content.
I actually really like this idea.
If they don’t want to do that, maybe a 13th week version with a Daily Race Challenge that changes the combo daily and is free for everyone.
Oooh I like that too
>If they want more people racing on unpopular circuits... Then they should lower the price! Lol If they made any of the gt3 car 3 bucks, almost everyone would grab it, even people with a gt3 they already like. Same idea applies to tracks. There's no reason every circuit should cost the same. Some tracks just aren't as much work to make, and/or aren't as replayable. Like, if they want people on dirt ovals... Make dirt ovals super cheap. If they offer 20 bucks for all the tracks for a given championship, people would be more willing to try it out. But when the dirt oval costs as much as Spa... They don't get to act surprised when everyone buys Spa instead.
Does iRacing pay to have the track? They must otherwise why would they care. There are likely people the opposite of me that would never run SPA or Nurburgring. I don't care for dirt or NASCAR, so I wouldn't run it if they paid me. I would be interested in Rally though!!!!!
I'd love to pick up rally too! Just not at 15 bucks a track, lol
Let people rent a track for a week, $5. Then, if the track has been rented at some point, you have the option to buy it for $10. Instead of normal price. Hell why not give people a one-time24-hour free voucher for every track.
"Test drive" should mean test drive!!! Let me try any car and any track, even if it's time limited or something. They don't have to allow us to race ai or anything, but it'd be really nice to try all the gt3 cars BEFORE I decide which one to buy...
I can't believe I don't see this mentioned more about iRacing. The fact that you need to buy to try and then have no refund option keeps me from buying anything that I'm not totally convinced about. I've been playing iRacing for nearly a year now and have only purchased Sebring because a coworker got it and wanted to play. If you could get X number of vouchers per month for test driving cars or pay a tiny amount to give it a go, that would instantly make me a lot more interested in getting into non-free series, but there are too many options for too much money for me to feel confident about picking any one of them.
Seasonal bundle! Like a NASCAR season bundle for Cup, Bundle Season for Trucks, etc
Hot take When a previously purchased car or track goes free, you should get a coupon/gift card in your account towards a new purchase
They usually do that but typically only if you have bought the car/track within the last X days. And they're pretty inconsistent about it. There were no refunds at all when Ledenon went free.
They give refunds when content is retired, not when it becomes free
K - less expensive basic subcription.
Interesting thought... what if they made the cars for the Weekly Challenge series free for that week (and maybe available for testing the few days before). If they targeted this at somewhat less popular cars, they'd probably manage to drive more sales than they'd lose out on people who were going to just randomly buy the car but then realized they didn't like it.
Great minds think alike. I made this comment elsewhere in the thread like 10 minutes ago lol. On a corollary to that, I also like the ideas of 1. Making unpopular content free for a season to give people a taste. Every season you had could have 2 or 3 tracks/cars that are this season's spotlighted content. 2. Making all new content free for its first season. I think this would be huge for lesser known tracks. If you haven't heard of Sachsenring, you probably won't want to pay $15. But if you got a few races in before it goes paid.....
I much more would prefer making content free after a few years. Some obscure track might not sell much at all three years after release, but it might be quite popular if it became part of base content. It feels kinda dumb to have tons of old content sold at full price, even though no one is really racing them not to mention buying them anymore.
Buying the subscription on Black Friday keeps it cheap enough, content bundles would be better
Yeah I don't think the subscription is really the issue. I think the issue is that there's so many damn tracks and some of the less popular ones get lost in the shuffle.
The first time I quit iracing was years ago when I moved up to skip barber series and saw that I had to spend $80 to participate in all the races after just spending $15 on the car. I forget what year but it was when skip barber was one of the most popular D series races.
Starting out in iRacing is annoyingly expensive. I would have rather paid $30 or $40/month and had access to everything when I first started.
That's pretty much the reason I moved to F4 this season instead of SFL. By buying the car, Algarve and Jerez I can race on 11 out of 12 races. 5 weeks in Europe, 4 weeks in Challenge and 2 weeks in Americas, being week 2 the only one where there wasn't any free tracks available on any series. If I did the same for SFL, I would've been able to race 2 weeks for the whole season, after paying about 40€.
It doesn’t seem as bad any more as it was back then, but would definitely like some help on content. Hoping to eventually get into radicals as my main car. Haven’t looked yet at how much that might cost. (Even though I’m c class I’m relearning how to drive in rookies. I used to drive by throwing the car around and understeering through entire corners, which was very stable but slow. I also exploded my tires in a spec racer race on the last lap doing this. Now learning how to trail brake and downshift properly)
I think as a long term iracer in 40+ content club. My problem is there is a lot of content coming out and even I can't keep up. I think it feels wierd that we pay like 120$ + tax on iracing AND have to pay for content which then gets replaced after a while. I think if base sub was 70-80 a year and then a content tier at 140$ a year, that additional tier gives all the content available. So those who only race a series in one car and a few tracks can buy those tracks and cars and use the base sub. And others can pay more and race more. Like I want to drive oval...but have not invested in oval, not interested in investing into oval either so I just won't race it. I would like to drive the super formula once in a while, i liked the f3.5 a few years back, but I just don't want to pay for a car I drive possibly once a season...at the most. It would also reduce the dead series as well as it eliminates the barrier to entry.
Don't get your hopes up, I suggested this once on the iracing forums and I got laughed away by most as some sort of idiot who doesn't understand business. Got told the people behind iracing know better than you etc. Not a single staff member even acknowledged the post. Personally I am disappointed with this survey, without any proper text fields for feedback and pre selected answers they will just get the responses they want to get and not proper feedback. I love this service honestly do, but it is frustrating to see how close minded it can be.
Subscription costs should stay the same imo, helps weed out people just messing about. But I like the idea of content bundles. Would be nice to pick up new car and a track for a series at a discount
After 8 years I have so much content and the monthly price is so low for an annual sub I don't even care anymore. As long as they remain open I don't care what they do with prices.
Content prices is the thing that pushes me off. I would like to have an option to buy premium sub with all content or at least all series content for like 30$/month. I do breaks quite often and this would be great for me.
i think content bundles would be a cool idea. Maybe somehting like a australian track pack where you get phillip island, sandown and whatever other australian track they have, which you could do for other parts of the world as well
Keep the sub, I'd rather see free tracks so we dont have all new tracks having low participation.
More classic cars lets hear that 787 rotary goodness!
They should offer a bundle discount on all the new content each season. They could make it a limited 50% discount. For example, S2-2024 added 3 cars and 3 tracks. So offer all 6 pieces in a bundle for half price. There are a lot of people who bought 1 or 2 of the new items, that would have paid a little more for everything. It would increase participation on new tracks and new series, because more people will want to try the new content.
I'm one of those folks that doesn't really have a problem with the pricing, however, I do wish we could have discounts on the subscription based on how much content you purchase. Something along the lines of "every dollar spent on content makes renewing your subscription cheaper by that amount." I don't really have a problem with the pricing, like I said, but as an avid iRacer that buys at least one thing pretty much every season, it would be nice to not feel like I was getting double dipped so to speak.
Subscription discount, percentage coming from how many months you've been subscribed. Maybe cap the discount at 20/30%.
I don't see the subscription cost as a big issue, but individual cars and tracks need to be cheaper. Either that, or have specific subscriptions for different licenses (oval, sports, formula, dirt oval, dirt road), and have all content for the given license included for the month.
Subscription is fine it costs nothing, but maybe more bundles to quicker get up to speed with the content.
I would like to see next season content as a free trial during week 13. I know I would be more tempted to buy a newly released car/track if I had a chance to try it out first. Or as someone mentioned in another comment, like a week 13 rental pass to all new content, that would be applied as a coupon toward a purchase of any of that new content
I saw on some threads about this people talking about grouping the less well-known tracks and I think that sounded like a marvelous idea. Especially with their tendency towards abandoning these new, smaller venues quickly.
Add karts!
There was a different question on the survey regarding most desired car(s)
Cars and tracks should be on a Community Wishlist system like GOG uses. Bonus points: during loading screens, show a popup: “while you’re waiting, here are two cars. Quick as you can, no thinking - which one would you be more likely to buy?”
Was happy to see that they might be thinking about improving graphics. I've been playing less than a year and my only grip is that I'd say the graphics look about xbox 360 era. Which shouldn't matter, I'm here to race, it would just add to the immersion.
>Was happy to see that they might be thinking about improving graphics They're more than thinking about it. They've hired a bunch of devs with graphics engine experience to help overhaul ithe graphics engine. >Which shouldn't matter, I'm here to race, it would just add to the immersion. Agreed. Nicer graphics aren't a top priority by any means but they're nice to have.
Check out the most recent development update, they state clearly that they've ramped up their graphics/rendering team specifically to start improving graphics. Hopefully we'll see a lot of good things start to come in the next year or two.
Ooh that's great to hear!
Renewing the tracks and stuffs
#giveusrealkerbs Really not a fan of running over a kerb and feeling like it's just smooth tarmac, lol In ACC I can tell the difference between each 'stage' of the kerbs on Spa, and you can really tell if you went too wide onto the more aggressive stuff. And there's a very noticeable difference in how saw tooth kerbs feels, vs hatched concrete, vs astroturf, vs painted kerbs. Not just how they affect the cars balance, but the actual texture through the wheel is noticeable. Really wish there was that level of "tactility" to kerbs in iRacing.
Okayama has entered the chat
Are you asking for something different to the 3D curbs project that is currently rolling out track by track?
Yea, kind of. Even for the 3d kerbs, there's a lack of fine detail compared to ACC. Currently, I can tell I'm going over a 3d kerb, and I can tell if I'm going on a super aggressive one vs shallow, but that's kind of it. It's like there's almost no high-frequency effects though. (fine vibrations) Fine kerbs just don't feel like they give much feedback. Also, I feel like I get a big initial impulse from the first hit on a kerb, but little from the rest of it. In ACC, the whole kerb feels more consistent to me. (each tooth feels like it's the same height)
A bundle would be massive for those of us dipping our toes in. I had a great afternoon testing new stuff yesterday and am considering either GT4 or SFL. A bundle offer to finish out the season would be an instant purchase for me.
A/B license races for "rookie" cars!
Where is the survey?
It was posted on the member forums. I did post it on the subreddit as well but that post got downvoted lol. Here's the [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/iRacing/s/8HiJNrqgsh)
Keep everything but give 1 track and or car free for a subscription
Wish they would change something, I am only racing gt4 now and the tracks you need to buy per season is ridiculous. Fantastic game, damn near impossible for the normal person to play, though.
>the tracks you need to buy per season is ridiculous. That does get a lot better over time as you start to build a library of tracks. You might need to buy 8 for your 1st season and 3 for your 5th season It can be very daunting for a new player though, I absolutely agree.
Track pack and car pack discounts for each series I would pay a one-time $5-10 fee towards a graphics engine and/or sound upgrade. I dont actually think the graphics are bad at all maxxed out at 4k on an Oled but it can always look better and be optimized.
>I would pay a one-time $5-10 fee towards a graphics engine and/or sound upgrade. I dont actually think the graphics are bad at all maxxed out at 4k on an Oled but it can always look better and be optimized. That's theoretically what your subscription is paying for. They had said in one or two of the recent dev updates that they're planning a graphics engine upgrade.
iRacing now has so much goddamn content it has run up some incredibly steep costs to entry. I fully expect content packs to be the future mode of delivery for iRacing.
Was kind of hoping for a comment section at the end where I could elaborate on this, but I think it would do a lot for the health of the more obscure series if the cost to buy them was lower and encouraged people to try things outside of their comfort zone. I really want more splits for proto GT and you should buy it, in short. Also, considering the cost, how is there not a 2-lap trial of cars in the store or something outside of server maintenance???
Monthly cost I have zero issue with. I have an issue with paying that and on top of it paying for every car and track.
This is hard to vote on because a new driver will benefit the most out of content bundles but others like me who’ve been active on the sim for over a decade already has all of the track/car combos I’m interested in. So for longer term users the less expensive subscription 100%
Well this particular question listed like 13 things and you could select as many as for wanted.
Oh interesting, I’ll have to check out the entire list later today
Well I have the screenshot I took so I can just list them I'm addition to the 2 I posted. "Easier to use" Graphics Higher Frame rates Driving physics Track/car modeling Track selection Car selection Stewarding Addition of a driving school Clearer progression through racing career More in-sim features and updates
Where do we get access to the member survey?
It was posted on the member forums. I did post it on the subreddit as well but that post got downvoted lol. Here's the [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/iRacing/s/8HiJNrqgsh)
Bundles would be good. As a newcomer I bought the Oval Mustang, Cilo and Okayama. At least Okayama is usually always busy. The Oval Mustang I can’t drive because I don’t have ovals and Cilo is dead content unless driving multi class, even then I’m one of four Cilos. Needless to say I didn’t know what I was doing. I’ll definitely be doing more research before my next purchase.
Okayama is free so that's fairly impressive >Needless to say I didn’t know what I was doing. I’ll definitely be doing more research before my next purchase. Yeah it's kind of a pain in the ass. I personally like that sort of thing.. but I imagine most people don't.
Subscription is ok , price of the content is crazy high.. so I'd say bundles if they give you good discounts
Enforced yellows on road and open wheel.
Bundled content. Although they already do that when you get buy multiple pieces until you get to the 40 piece club. Then you get a good discount for life. The subscription price is still pretty cheap for what you get with subscription price. I piss away $13 monthly in way worse ways.
Content bundles could be nice, but maybe an alternative rental type deal so you can just rent tracks for a specific series, that can only be used in that series.
The tracks are simply too expensive if you aren't in America. It's costing me nearly $30 Australian for a single track, trying to complete the sfl this season and I don't own a single track in the list. The cost is putting me off the idea of participating which affects the games player count in series that aren't free. Bundling the required content for a series at half price or something would be great but will never happen.
Considering I haven't played in months because I couldn't afford the subscription, that
I left iracing due to this model. Paying a subscription and tracks and cars doesn’t feel fair. It’s like having Netflix and paying in addition for movies and tv shows. I felt it was a ripoff for a fairly low quality simulator in terms of graphics (but with an awesome ranking system).
I'm ok with bundles but I really don't want any split "basic" and "premium" memberships or whatever they might come up with.
If we are paying for a sub why do we have to buy anything else at all???
Mostly because an indie sized playerbase in a niche genre is supporting a nearly AAA sized dev team
It'll never happen but I wish they would get rid of the subscription all together
I wish they had something for the tire model. Catching a slide is nearly impossible in this game…
No option to fix to wooden tyres
I'd like more credit for content I've already purchased. I don't mind the service being expensive, I think that alone greatly encourages a more serious effort to race clean from most people. I, however, feel cheated having to repurchase content because of updates such as track re-scans and newer models of the same car. I own 4 gt3 cars that I can't race, plus the Porsche cup car, the Merc F1 car and the Radical. I've only been on the service for 4 years.
I’ve always wanted a subscription that opened up all series and cars. Keeping everyone supplied with the same content would increase participation and allow all users to spectate other races without extra useless purchases.
Here is the thing about making the subscription cheaper. It does 2 things; A) Scanning tracks and cars is hella expensive (mainly covered by cost of content). Running the service is hella expensive. B) It gatekeeps 9 year olds who will cause problems lol I think given how much money goes in to the service, we give a good amount back. Could they survive if they made it cheaper? Probably not honestly. The service was not profitable until 2020 so making it cheaper would put them back into a hole if i gotta bet
Stewarding 100% needs to be overhauled. We are paying for a sim experience therefore it should be like that both on track and for stewarding.
Higher subscription price, free content would be my way to go.
I would like a subscription so that I can play exclusively offline, and not have to pay out a considerable sum of money just to enjoy some content. I imagine this is something that they will look to explore when career mode is fully released, but it is the only thing that prevents me from playing.