Re: The racing auditory display (RAD)
To add to 24-25:
It costs millions to make an AAA game. SMS had a crowd funded campaign for PCars 1. That got, from memory, around 3-4 million Euros. THEN they signed with Namco/Bandai. I was there. Now hear me out.
What happened next was....Namco came in, features got moved to DLC< features got cut, features got scrapped without a reason, all the while the studio head was saying everything was normal. Oh and of that 3 million....how much did I get? $60. Of 11 million sales at $60.
Here's a rough breakdown of what it costs to make a AAA game in 2018, genre agnostic:
You have staff wages
You have staff insurance and beneits
You have development tool costs
You have licensing deals to pay for
You have office rent to pay for
You have penalty clauses in the contract with a publisher
You have software costs
You have other overheads, like catering, and paying for company vehicles
Liensing's a tricky one. Here's a verry simple version:
I make a game
I go to Company A
I ask Company A if I can use them in my game
They pay me X bucks. They then say if I can have Y feature but not Z in my game.
I do the game, I release it
Company A takes a cut of the profits if it's in the deal.
And the best part? Hey, nobody ever gets to see the exat terms of the deal.
Also, Ethin's right. The racing community on PC as a whole is so small and insular that it will slaughter anyone using the RAD, I've been run off of forums for merely mentioning blindness in off topic forums. That's how....interesting it is on racing game forums. Yet I've sat and painted cars for various sims over the years and done art work for various games, and the community never said thanks aside from hitting a button a few times and downloading. Point is.... the PC racing community as a whole is closed off and insular. There was a blog, now closed, that pointed out how insular the PC racing (specifically sim) market was. You got companies pushing $2500 wheels and pedal sets. Do you really think they want the RAD to come along? Admitedly it's like Apple, people who like their wheels will buy the latest and greatest.
Also to whoever said racing games are doable with a gamepad...no, for a simple reason...
Gamepads have what...50-60 degrees of travel vs up to 900+ on a wheel? For that reason alone during my time at SMS we had to fudge the gamepad input to make it remotely playable....yet the stats I saw for pCars 1? 99.9% of people were using wheel/pedal sets. I've been told from a former SMS dev who worked on PC2 that it's the same for the sequel. It's not a shock really...wheels are a better fit for racing games. On that note: TS3 has force feedback, by the way.
On that note: FF is nowhere near realistic actually. Nor are most* high end racing sims. That you can buy on a PC. The profssional grade stuff the teams use is a whole other level and the teams keep a strict grip on that one..
All it takes is for a big Youtuber to try the RAD and say they don't like it, boom, product us buried and nobody will take it seriously ever again in the general racing sphere. Here's a question: Would you want to be part of a community that only ever wants one way of playing games?
Trik question, I know, but....the racing genre on PC at least does, it's wheel or get out. Hell, I've seen and heard people who are supposedly high ranking sim racers sceam at new guys for being slow or making mistakes like spinning the car. Point is: You go online, with the RAD, with a wheel or gamepad, you're going to get torn to shreds regardlesss, the RAD just puts a bigger target on your back for the racers to point to and tell you to go back to running offline vs the AI.
Also, Exclusiity. Let's say EA gets a hold of this: They'll want to make it exclusive to their games. Turn 10 gets it? It's ONLY in Forza, Polyphony gets it? Only in GT Sport, Studio 397 gets it? ONLY in rFator 2. Point is: A publisher will want it to be exclusive to use as a stick to smack players with. See Porsche being exclusive to EA for some 15 years for evidence. See for 15 long years how EA bought up the desirable stuff and put out mediocre games. Fun fact: EA wanted to lock SMS to an exclusive deal. SMS were smart enough to outfox EA and get away from that.scea
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