There is no market for arcade racing games without licensed vehicles. The only one which can still have some success is Burnout imho.
This is an incredibly silly thing to say.
Heavens forbid anybody tries something different in the gaming industry.
The problem isn't that Codemasters did something different for the racing genre - they definitely did. The problem is that they didn't accurately portray what kind of game ONRUSH was to the average consumer. This thread is proof, really, with people still not really sure what type of racing game it truly is, months after release. That sort of thing really kills you, no matter what type of game you have, and how good it is. You can sing the praises of a title, as this very site did for ONRUSH, as much as you want, but if the publisher is not going to do an adequate job describing what type of game this is right out the gate to the average consumer, why should they bother picking up an $80 game Canadian right out the gate?
It also is not helped that Codemasters, whether by their own volition or through problems with the studio, simply do not support their games past a certain point, if at all. DiRT Rally had the VR taste tester thingie, that's it. DiRT 4 has had no sort of DLC at all. Goes all the way back to the original DiRT tbh. They simply make the game, release it, maybe push out a couple patches or too, and then just forget about it. If I am a consumer, why bother playing the game if there isn't going to be anything else coming in the pipe that I can get excited for that might make me pop the game in again after playing through it? T10 and PG have done a good job with this in terms of Forza Motorsport and Forza Horizon - every month you can expect a DLC pack, and you can expect at minimum, an expansion or two (barring the anomaly that is Forza Motorsport 7) every 3 to 4 months or so. I'm not saying that Codemasters should adopt the DLC schedule of T10 or PG, but at least give fans
something to look forward to, instead of ******** out a game and letting it sit without any sort of new content for the rest of the lifespan of the title.