2 - I am sorry, but I just don't share that opinion of yours of believing that us gamers are in some type of mystical golden age of race games.
Driveclub's studio is shut down. Project Cars was crowd funded. Assetto Corsa only appeals to the hardcore. Forza Motorsport is turning into near copy of what GT used to be. Everybody is putting out nice graphics, the same tracks, similar cars, all which can lead to the games looking indistinguishable unless some form of bullet point list is created and "experts" chime in with authoritative knowledge.
You're missing the point: the "golden age" comment has to do with what's available to us, the consumers. Not whether a studio was shut down, or where the money came from to get another title out the door. In the last (just over) two years alone, we've had the following on consoles:
- Driveclub (October 2014)
- The Crew (December 2014)
- Project CARS (May 2015)
- F1 2015 (July 2015)
- Forza Motorsport 6 (September 2015)
- WRC 5 (October 2015)
- Need For Speed (November 2015)
- Sebastien Loeb Rally Evo (January 2016)
- DiRT Rally (March 2016)
- F1 2016 (August 2016)
- Assetto Corsa (August 2016)
- NASCAR Heat Evolution (September 2016)
- Forza Horizon 3 (September 2016)
- WRC 6 (October 2016)
You'll have to forgive me if I find your comment about every game including the same tracks and cars misleading. Driveclub doesn't share tracks, but it actually has a large percentage of cars unique to the genre (or at least, that list above). The Crew, NFS, and Horizon obviously don't share any tracks with other games. Same with DiRT.
Of the ones that do focus on real-world circuits, yeah, there's a fair amount of crossover, which is to be expected to a point. A game touting itself as realistic pretty much has to have the 'Ring these days (and, increasingly, Brands Hatch and Silverstone).
There's also some expected overlap with cars. But again, not as much as you'd expect. A few cars are in just about every modern road-based game (McLaren P1), but I haven't seen as many Super GT cars collected en masse outside of Gran Turismo. No other console game covers Group 5 (or 60's F1, or Formula E, or Can-Am, or V8 Supercars...) as well as FM6. Project CARS has a lock on GT4 and GT3-class racers. Assetto Corsa has a few unique cars (not even looking at the Porsche DLC, which is a huge draw until other devs start getting their hands on it).
I can't remember another time where we've been so spoiled with as many
quality options, personally.
I may be completely off base, but none of these games (including Gran Turismo) is setting the world on fire with the tens of millions of known PS4 and XB1 users out there. I mean, if we just focus on the 50 million PS4's out there that have been sold to consumers and compare them to amount of the players actually playing the games, it is easy to notice a problem exists. For example, Driveclub has sold a known 2 million games. What I see is a very low percentage of PS4 users even bothered to play the game. Why?
IMO, the answer is simply too complicated. There's myriad reasons, likely. Gamer tastes have changed. The public's perception of the automobile has changed. Mobile gaming is huge (it barely existed in the modern way back during GT1-4). Any combination of those reasons, plus any number more, make it an impossible question to answer.
I know a few people who bought GTA V — sometimes, even a PS3 to go along with it — simply because of the hype. That was a social
movement of a launch. GT doesn't muster that, it seems (nor do any other racing games). You may be onto something that the GT name alone equals sales. As mentioned, FM6 is practically a modern GT game in all but name (better in most respects, even), but it hasn't even come close to matching GT6's sales figures (no doubt complicated by the comparatively slow-selling XB1).
But GT6 seems to show that the GT name
isn't enough to sell a game in massive numbers. It still sold more than any other racing game since, yes... but it sold less than half of what GT5 managed. Over the years, people have blamed that on a variety of reasons too — releasing post-PS4, not being different enough from GT5, etc etc — but we'll never really know. We also don't know if that was actually a blow to PD, since we have no idea what their internal break-even point was. It very well may have been a success to them. Though PD did take far longer to start announcing the game's sales figures than it did with any other title...