The Watkins Glen road course has been added to the iRacing.com lineup of tracks yesterday, bringing another NASCAR venue to the online racing simulation.
Aldo Villaiml has sent in a full lap video of the track for everybody to enjoy, using the Formula Mazda car. So if you´re an iRacing customer who is unsure if to get the $25 track or just want to check out iRacing’s latest goods- You can experience Watkins Glen by watching the video below.
Watkins Glen Formula Mazda (Iracing) from Aldo Villamil on Vimeo.
tarnakman
November 28th, 2008 at 05:41
25$ for a single track?
tezuka_18
November 28th, 2008 at 07:30
give it a year. Unless the devs are very stubborn, the prices will fall on everything
UncleChuckle
November 28th, 2008 at 08:27
$25? Are they taking the piss? You can buy GTR-Evolution for that price!
And people are actually paying this? And I mean REAL, NORMAL people with normal lives, not numpties like frickin’ Junior.
iRacing: Proof that there really is one born every minute.
Kaemmer may be an arse (and I’ve heard that straight from people who know the guy) but dear god he’s a 21st century PT Barnum!
Misan
November 28th, 2008 at 08:28
25$ for a single track?
Holy sh**….
i just bought STCC für 20$ with 5 Tracks in it and a whole bunch of cars.
The Scissor between rich and poor is opening for the Simracing Community, eh?
Crazy Bored
November 28th, 2008 at 10:25
It sure has $25 worth of improvements over anything available in rFactor. It really gets to me when straightaways have incorrect lengths and the radius of some corners is completely off. I’ve had more fun testing this track all alone in the Radical than any combination in other sims, when I get put in a 30 car grid this weekend it will really be something.
The Lonely
November 28th, 2008 at 11:06
Correct radius and lengths are easily done by an accomplished modder. Correct elevations are harder but can be achieved with in a meters accuracy by a well informed modder – and I doubt most gamers would notice that difference.
The real difficulty is getting the surface bumps correct, which iRacing has an obvious advantage. Whether its $25 worth of advantage, well that isn’t for me to say.
JacobSharp
November 28th, 2008 at 11:36
Accurated tracks are nice but not the asking price which is ridiculously unrealistic. If this track is 99% accutated then i don’t mind a lesser accurated track that can be had by our generous & passionate modders which I think created tracks that are at most 10% less accurate then those offer ny IRacing but heh I am a happy man…Free beer any1?
Oh yeah, I have it when SRT at time talk about iRacing like is the ultimate )(*&$^@&#^&* Sim..jeez
Anyway, PEACE all..juz my opinion.
drowsy
November 28th, 2008 at 13:06
So, still no free trial? I wouldn’t necessarily mind paying for tracks and cars, and I already play a bunch of MMO’s so the monthly fee isn’t a problem, but I still want to test what I’m getting before I even think about buying, since there’s a lot of other simracers to play.
Peter
November 28th, 2008 at 13:59
You can try it out for $20 for 1 month.
Tifose
November 28th, 2008 at 14:01
i just give the guys over at iRacing high five!!! for making a game like this and also making so much money in return wow this is the best money making game ever sweeeeet!!!
navalhawkeye
November 28th, 2008 at 14:51
You know they probably don’t make much money in profit, right? It costs them THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS of dollars to go scan each track.
Peter
November 28th, 2008 at 15:08
Also it costs them money aswell for the licenses for each car they create so wouldn’t be suprised if it will take them some time before they even turn a profit.
Tifose
November 28th, 2008 at 15:17
at the end of the day the do make money even if it’s $5 USD that’s alot when the have over 100 downloads a day
navalhawkeye
November 28th, 2008 at 15:39
But they aren’t making that much per car, or track. And you do realize that the man that owns this whole thing owns the Boston Red Sox…and still races on it…he is not exactly looking to make a profit off of it. If he was, he wouldn’t be making a sim.
DRat
November 28th, 2008 at 16:28
The exact duplication of the iRacing tracks’ geography and surface are absolutely great if you are trying to pre-test “on the cheap” at a track where you will soon be doing real racing. It’s also damn nice to drive on a sim track where the bumpiness is realistic instead of that maddening continuous fast bouncing you get at speed with some mods and tracks in GTR2, rFactor, GTL, etc.
All else said, though, as a part-time simracer I cannot commit to fixed racing schedules and do 95% of my racing offline as time allows. So, for me it is just not worth the fees. I’ve tried it out and think it is great, and for some it will not be too pricey, but for me it makes no sense time-wise or money-wise. Let’s all go back to GPL, where the racing was grittier and more realistic.
Eddie
November 28th, 2008 at 18:15
It just is a bit ridiculous imo. They make you pay per month, then charge you for pretty much anything?
I would not mind as much if it was not pay per month, but paying for both seems real crappy of them.
ral42
November 28th, 2008 at 21:41
Here we go again with the usual whining about price. Nice to see some people around here who get it, but most still don’t seem to understand.
Yes, $25 for a track seems like a lot to pay, on top of a monthly subscription. But you don’t have to buy all of the content in iRacing to have a good time. You can pick and choose what you’re interested in. It’s like buying individual tracks instead of albums, or individual TV channels instead of a bundle containing mostly crap you don’t care about. Consumers have said over and over that they prefer the a la carte model for content, because they don’t want to subsidize development of content they don’t care about or don’t intend to consume.
This kind of content is expensive to develop, and iRacing is a business that needs to move towards profitability. Supposedly it costs them around $100,000 to scan a single track. I don’t know if that even includes all of the work that goes into making it sim-ready. As of mid-November, they supposedly have around 7500 subscribers. Let’s say they make an average of $15/month off each subscriber – that’s $112,500 per month, or $1.3M/year. That’s not even enough to cover payroll, let alone costs of scanning tracks, developing cars, licensing fees, server infrastructure and hosting, office space, all the costs incurred during the years before they opened for business, advertising, promotions, trade shows, etc etc etc.
Do you expect John Henry to just dump boatloads of cash into a business that is way cashflow negative indefinitely? That’s not how business works. Paying a one time purchase fee of $50 or $100 is not enough to sustain this kind of business. Neither is a $15/month subscription fee, unless they get a MUCH larger number of subscribers. But the market is small. They’re never going to see WoW-like 80M/month subscription revenue. The smaller the market, the higher the prices – if the company wants to stay in business.
the.cosmic.pope
November 28th, 2008 at 21:42
I’d pay $25 for VLM Le Mans if they asked me.
Tifose
November 28th, 2008 at 22:20
ral42 i understand what your saying and i know it’s not cheap at for them to make a track or car,at the end of the day the pick to walk this road and invest in this area there goal is to make a dam good racing sim if not the best but there not working and making all this cars and tracks for free you need to spend money to get back more money
like i say there Smart!!! and it’s paying off for them
i just have too much bills to pay things to buy and money to save for hard times!!!
yokelhama
November 28th, 2008 at 22:25
What about Eastern Creek for rfactor? That is laser-scanned and very accurate with bumps etc, I doubt that cost $100,000 for the track-maker to scan and it was FREE to download! So it can be done. If it was $25 for a trackpack (5 tracks etc) then that’d be more fair.
Eddie
November 28th, 2008 at 23:16
Exactly Yokelhama, beat me to it.
The Lonely
November 28th, 2008 at 23:25
It cost Piddy thousands of dollars out of his own back pocket, and that was substantially reduced from the normal price. So get your facts straight first.
tarnakman
November 28th, 2008 at 23:48
ral42: im sorry to deceive you but it doesn’t cost 100.000$ to scan a single track.. especially if you already got the laser-scanning devices (such as iracing team development).
a laser-scanning device is very expensive; betwen 20k up to 40k. With it (and hundreds of hours) you can scan dozens of tracks.. then you have to do all the rest of the work, which im sure The Lonely knows pretty much about :)
so having fees of 25$ for a single track by pretexting it’s laser scanned when you already charges monthly fees is a complete rip off if you ask me and this is why this game will never join the mass of sim racers.
Sim racing is a very little market for gaming, to succeed to need to be affordable and open, i dont understand their strategy. I wish them goodluck tough cause it’s a quality product.. but i won’t drown my ass for hours driving around in a solstice.
ral42
November 29th, 2008 at 00:25
Regarding the $100,000 per track, it was recently written in a print magazine by a guy who visited the iRacing office:
http://www.motorsportmagazine.co.uk/2008/11/12/racing-on-line-with-iracingcom/
Maybe he’s got his facts straight, maybe not. But I could imagine the $100k figure not being too far off.
navalhawkeye
November 29th, 2008 at 01:14
Lets see…it takes an 8 hour day to scan 1 mile of track.
-4 days to scan lets say Road America
-5 days worth of hotels, food, transportation
-Round trip flight for maybe 5 or 6 guys – that alone has to be close to 2k dollars (if not more maybe?)
-Then getting access to the track while nothing is going on…
-License fees (it was said that’s why Milwuakee was expensive)
-Putting it all together back in the office takes months
I can see where it’s close to 100k, can’t you?
So, Tifose, why do you resort to bashing the sim, when your only grounds for attack are the price? Why does the price alone make it a crap sim?
ermax18
November 29th, 2008 at 01:53
The thing people keep forgetting is iRacing is a business. They can’t copy another businesses product (track/car) and then sell it for a profit. They have to do it legit with proper licensing and contracts. This isn’t cheap. As for the Eastern Creak comparison. Piddy had personal contact with the track that allowed access to the track for scanning. As far as I know his only cost was his time and the hardware. Also, Piddy isn’t selling his track so the track owner isn’t going to be concerned about licensing. This argument about pricing is getting so old. We all know by now that iRacing isn’t for everyone. I get sick of the iRacing fanboys that think they are special becuase they can afford the game. But I also get sick of people that continually bash the game simply becuase of the price. This is just biz. They aren’t going to lower the prices until they think it is in the best interest of the company. All the bitching on the forums isn’t going to drive prices down.
Tifose
November 29th, 2008 at 03:23
navalhawkeye maybe i do bash iRacing alot
but i have a reason for doing so there price well always make people go wow and i understand why the put a price to everything, take a look at GT5 you walk in a store and pay 40 to 60 for it walk home play one dam good looking game that by far has the best car modeling and also laser-scanned tracks
ermax18
November 29th, 2008 at 03:33
Tifose, you have another bad comparison. iRacing would probably cost a one time fee of $20 with all current content if they could reach the masses that GT5 does. If you want to bash a game over price then bash GT5 becuase it has a much larger profit margin.
navalhawkeye
November 29th, 2008 at 04:14
No, you don’t have any reasons. Your only reason is the price, and you’ve worn that out.
Tifose
November 29th, 2008 at 04:19
lol then i guess that’s my only reason haha you win buddy