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New Racing Simulation Distances Itself From Gamers
waderoush writes "In an unusual move that could alienate a large segment of potential customers, iRacing.com, an online racing simulation company that opened its site to the public on August 26, is calling its system a 'driver development tool' that isn't designed for PC or console gamers. 'We don't think of ourselves as a game company,' says one exec. 'World of Warcraft has a real appeal...But our system is more serious, frankly. If you are serious about racing, our product is for you, because getting on a [simulated] track with a full field of other drivers and racing against them safely involves as much commitment and time investment as if you went to racing school.' In fact, to distinguish its system from MMOs, the company has come up with a new acronym to describe its simulation: MMIS, for 'massively multiparticipant Internet sport.'"
New MMO startup is completely full of itself, wants to sell you overpriced hardware.
It's clear that this is a game, they're just targeting it to people who normally sneer at "gamers", and who have a lot of disposable income.
I read the internet for the articles.
You make fun of it, but it's a real issue.
Have you ever been in game development? If so, what was the reaction of people outside the IT biz when you told them you're making games?
Creating games is usually a whole lot more complicated and requires a lot more knowledge and experience than the average business application, due to quite a few reasons. You need considerable mathematic knowledge, you need(ed) good assembler skills, you need to know a lot about the APIs you're working with, your code is incredibly time critical so optimization is a core issue for you, etc. All that and more does not apply at all to business apps. I've seen people in business app development that went straight out of some sort of evening school and were put behind a project to create productive code, with little care about stability, safety or reliability. Some bozo at Q&A will do that.
Yet when you talk with people outside the biz, the guy doing business apps will certainly get a lot more credibility than you, who're "only" making toys.
I can see why a company does not want to be associated with "toys", that their product is a "serious" racing simulation. Whether it's a marketing stunt is debatable. It certainly is. I just doubt it's just to get some publicity. I can very well see why a company would want to put some distance between themselves and the "toys".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And I thought they were just trying to appeal to the elitist instinct in many gamers.
"because getting on a [simulated] track with a full field of other drivers and racing against them safely involves as much commitment and time investment as if you went to racing school"
So you truley believe that:
buying a $50 USB steering wheel
paying $10/month for your racing game
racing from the comfort of your home in your underwear
the biggest fear of dying is malnutrition
Equates to:
renting a $200,000 racecar or using your own car
flying or driving to a racetrack and renting it for $50-$1000
suiting up with flameretardant clothes, full face helmet, full body restraints
feeling G forces, pure adrenaline, and the fear of bursting into flames at any moment
Of course, why didn't I see it!
You see this elsewhere in the gaming world. In europe, there is a huge market for historical simulations for obsessed history buffs. They could tell you how heavy a particular shell fired in WW1 was, how long it took to forge an average pike, death rates in small vs large villages in the renissance, etc. And of course there are a lot of different names to these things (historical simulations, etc) to try to differentiate these from the more casual "games" people play.
In America, we have groups of people obsessed with flight simulators. These are both the people who take 8-hours on a saturday to fly from Boston Logan to SFO in their kitchen, and the more esoteric people who take 3 months to fly a moon mission. Sure, you could call Microsoft Flight Simulator a game, but it is more accurately described as either a Simulator, or a Borderline Creepy Obsession.
Calling a game which requires that kind of creepy dedication a "sport" doesn't seem all that far off from a categorization standpoint, and it helps them to connect their game with people looking for that kind of thing. I can't comment on the game itself, but this positioning seems understandable.
The ______ Agenda