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.'"

Comments

Can you say publicity stunt?

[bonkeydcow]

I think you can.
Come on. Oh we are too good to be called a game, but come play it. Give me a break.

Re:Can you say publicity stunt?

[Opportunist]

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".

Re:Can you say publicity stunt?

[Austerity Empowers]

And I thought they were just trying to appeal to the elitist instinct in many gamers.

Re:Can you say publicity stunt?

[PinkPanther]

Unlike the rest of you, I am not an elitist.

Re:Can you say publicity stunt?

[polar red]

Creating games is usually a whole lot more complicated and requires a lot more knowledge and experience than the average business application

I would prefer to say different rather than harder. Creating business apps also requires some skills that are not found in games, for example : disentangling the business rules, interacting with users, making sense of the 20 year old system which consists of cobol-programs, jcl, ... all written by 20 different people which aren't there anymore, and you're stuck with a database which is a melting pot of 3 older systems ...

Re:Can you say publicity stunt?

[Goldberg's Pants]

iRacing is simply the MMO business model applied to the racing genre. Sadly a bunch of my race sim buddies have fallen for Dave Kaemmer's bullshit and subscribed. However the reviews I'm hearing from folk are primitive graphics etc...

Papyrus know how to do racing physics. Grand Prix Legends is ten years old and still holds it's own on the current crop of sims from ISI, Simbin etc... But this just screams of publicity stunt. It's basically a subscription based ranking system. It's kinda like a virtual SCCA.

Dave Kaemmer stuck a stake through the heart of the NR2003 community when iRacing first came into being as First Racing, and threatened a bunch of folk with lawsuits, actually DID take Tim McArthur to court if I recall (ultimately settled out of court), just so they could reuse code from NR2003 for this thing. Apparently modding a now five year old video game was somehow damaging their business. They changed their name to iRacing after all the bad publicity of threatening their potential customers with legal action.

I'll stick to sims made by DECENT companies who don't screw their users over, thanks.

Re:Can you say publicity stunt?

[cgenman]

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.

A better headline:

[jandrese]

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.

Re:A better headline:

[martinw89]

Yeah. From the article, it's a $20 monthly or $156 annual subscription. THEN, to get anything more than absolutely shitty cars (Pontiac Solstice??) and shitty tracks you have to buy your way up.

Sport?

[Trojan35]

If driving in a hot car for 5 hours @188MPH isn't considered a sport... ...sitting in front of your computer for 5 hours DEFINITELY IS.

WTF?

[llZENll]

"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!

So let's review

[Anonymous Coward]

1) iRacing buys rights/code/everthing related to NASCAR Racing 2003, Sierra/Papyrus's final great NASCAR sim.

2) They then chase off a lot of modders for the game (who were making custom tracks, etc), threatening legal action etc etc. (see: http://forum.tmcarthur.net/viewtopic.php?t=52) After meeting resistance, their lawyers presumably move on to more productive activities, like kicking puppies.

3) Now, years later, they finally get around to releasing a new "racing simulation" based on what's now 6 year old code. And they want people to pay out the bum for it.

4) rFactor is probably better anyway.

Good luck with that, guys.