Turn 10 imo have a huge dilemma going forward...Reading forums it seems most people are sick to death of their DLC policy (Season pass, Monthly Pass or buying Single cars) They have started losing fans but im not sure they even know this as their success over the years is clearly clouding judgement
Now, kids, sit down for a while, uncle Clyde's gonna tell you how the world spins.
The world of videogaming, nowadays, is a world of big investments. You want to make a triple-A blockbuster title? You need money, then. How much? A lot of it. And you want to include loads of licensed cars, tracks and brands? Then you better have a wallet as big as Switzerland, because the holders of any patent and intellectual property you're planning to use will ask for a six-digit check at the very least.
What does that mean for the poor, relatively small developer? It means that he has to find ways to spend money that he doesn't have, hoping that the investment will pay off. Many developers had to let themselves be acquired by bigger software houses (sometimes with disastrous results, as any disgruntled fan of the Sim City series will tell you). Many other have to resort to financing. You may be familiar with the term if you have a mortgage on your house; the only difference is that your house probably didn't cost 250 million dollars, and if you don't pay it back your house is a (somewhat) solid good that the bank can repossess and put back on the market to cut losses; wherein people will finance your grandiose videogame project only if they can ensure they have a return of investment, because if they don't, they basically did something akin to taking a bunch of dollar bills and throwing them in a furnace. But those are things that someone with some expertise in the weird and inextricable world of economics would surely explain better than I can.
Where does that factor in the quality of the games you're playing, like say, FM5? It factors everywhere. Things like the DLC pricing and release model, up to what features, cars and tracks should be prioritized for inclusion in the game or outright removed to not alienate casual gamers (which, like it or not, are the big buck of the gaming industry) are decided not by mr. Greenwalt or by T10, but by a marketing office that may be internal to T10, may be a division of Microsoft Gaming, or for all I know could even be an external company. Or all of the above, working in unison to make sure the investors get back their money, T10 gets a tidy profit, everyone's happy.
And the casual gamers want to drive the latest, coolest cars there are around. They want the cool McLaren car Jeremy Clarkson drove last night on Top Gear. They don't want to be in a Le Mans car when they don't even know where Le Mans is; they don't want to drive a Group 5 Ford Capri when for them is an old chump car with ridiculous spoilers and terrible handling. They want assists to tame cars they couldn't (and wouldn't) drive in real life, because they have no actual interest in cars. For them a game's worth another. They're just in for twenty, thirty hours of fun tops. Perhaps they'll stay long enough to buy DLC, but who knows, really - is it worth, then, to develop new assets for each and every DLC, make more investments when the profits are not sure?
The truth is, we've had it too good for too long. Graphics kept going upwards in quality (and quantity of rendered objects) by leaps and bounds in the late 90s / early 2000s. Nowadays developers are working with technology that twenty minutes ago was only in the hands of NASA, or F1 teams. The costs of development have increased exponentially, and the demands of us, the gamers, did too. So, they have to play it safe, and more often than not sacrifice the happiness of their fanbase to make sure they have a return of investment and maybe, if there's time and resources left to devote to this task, make the fanbase happy the next time around.
Trust me when I tell you that when mr. Greenwalt wants to turn car lovers into gamers and gamers into car lovers, he really means it. But the problem is, the hard decisions are not made by the code monkeys and the visionaries; they're made by marketing guys who can't, don't and won't care about the 1% of the target market for their product. They're only paid to turn investment into profits and profits into investment, and that's what they'll do.
And I'm sorry if this is off-topic, but I feel that this should be brought up when someone (rightfully) asks whenever the "Motorsport" word should be part of the title of future Forza games or shouldn't.
