An Open Letter to the AMS2 Community

Greetings Everyone!

First of all, some great news - we are happy to confirm the V1.6 update to AMS2 and all associated DLCs are rolling out over the course of today. We also have a Dev Update following up shortly with some notes about the udpate and the IMSA Track Pack, whch previous Dev Updates on V1.6 haven´t yet covered.

The above is the most relevant bit of this letter - if you are in the silent majority of users who are happy with AMS2 as is, happy to see V1.6 incoming and to take updates and developments as they come there is precious little further below you´ll find iof interest so you might as well skip it; if however you are one of those outraged or simply disappointed by how we have communicated (or not) during the course of V1.6 development and even before that, or if you are outraged at the outrage and thus taking part on the usual merry-go-around of internet drama, it might be worth reading on

We have always been a group of developers first and foremost; it´s what we do well and mean to focus on. We don´t want a team of managers and marketing people around us, and we want every bit of revenue to go for the developers and to fund further development. It´s definitely an approach of pros and cons and I wouldn´t suggest it is the optimal way to run a business - it is just the way I mean to run mine.

With that said, there are obviously limitations to how well one can handle various aspects of the business especially when a lot of is concentrated on one person, who isnt´necessarily skilled at all of them. I am obviously well aware the scattered breaking down of news, dev updates and mis-timed previews have grown long in the tooth and worn down the patience of many users, and now that we are on release day, I think we can discuss a few things about it more clearly, and how we plan to handle things moving forward.

As you know v1.6 is a major update to what is already a big game, and it has had a challenging gestation, including one of the major must-have features only really coming together over the last 10 days But the update is much more than this feature, the IMSA content, or the physics updates - we have reworked a lot of the game from the ground up, which should be evident to anyone who sees the contents of Pt1, Pt2, the New Cars of V1.6

Irrespective of that, a segment of our users clearly isn´t happy with the approach and that is not something we are oblivious to. Here perhaps it´s worth offering a brief historic perspective on our dev updates - we began them way back in 2013 during the development of GSC Extreme, long before these were the norm within sim racing development, just as a way to keep users attuned to what we were doing with it; by mid 2015 we had had a crowdfunding campaign to continue developing GSC Extreme beyond the point it had become commercially viable for us to do so in new sales alone.

The campaign was successful, GSC Extreme ended up becoming AMS1, and thus Dev Updates became not only a tool to communicate with the user base about development of the game, but a way to keep backers and early buyers attuned to what was happening to the thing they had backed. With AMS1 and then AMS2 growing ever larger and more wide reaching, these updates became denser and denser, and an expectation began to foster for this to keep going into bigger and bigger game updates, always preceding by these big dev updates.

Once AMS2 came around, again with a Season Pass and a backing campaign we continued delivering both game updates and development updates pretty much on a monthly basis, always trying to balance reviewing of the work that had been done for and incoming update with what would be coming up next, with some foresight into where the overall was heading. The primary goal of the dev updates thus has always been to communicate about development to people who had already given us their money for the products we had already sold them.

In this time the user base for AMS2 has also been steadily growing and at this point the majority of our current users aren´t old timers from GSC days, but people who come and go from other games and sims and many of them do seem to find all this previewing a little jarring; slowly but surely these updates have become harder to write as shorter term developments become more scarce, more time was being spent in deeper development efforts that are both inherently less predictable and more time-consuming to deliver; more new content is reliant on premium licensing agreements that can take months if not years to bring to conclusion; and more demands were put on writing about what the user base wanted to happen to AMS2, rather than purely what we were doing; unfortunately some of what they want simply doen´t happen within the time span of a month or two or even four (such as Multiplayer development); some of it just wasn´t what we mean to offer with AMS2.

This has become a slow-growing conundrum and one we have tried to balance as well as we could, admittedly with diminishing success - on one side we have some of our most loyal, long-standing users who not only enjoy but have come to expect the dev updates to come in regularly, packed full of info and previews and foresight of varying accuracy, and who are always hungry for more information; another segment of the community is more anxious, less tolerant of information that isn´t strictly precise, and see these articles as purely ads or teasers, which ultimately becomes frustrating if they are for products they can´t yet enjoy.

At some point trying to find a balance that appeases these diametrically opposed expectations has become untenable and the whole exercise not only futile but counter productive as it ends up centering every AMS2 discussion around whether this or that is happening, whether our estimates are going to be right, rather than what we believe is what should matter, which is what the game currently offers and the sheer volume of progress that is delivered on a regular basis, be it timed to perfection or not. Irrespective of how much you enjoy the end result of V1.6 one will be hard-pressed to dispute it packs an impressive amount of progress that is not typical of most game updates, let alone most racing sims within the time span of seven months.

We all should be able to agree that this dynamic does the community, ourselves and especially AMS2 a disservice, and for this reason we are going to change the approach moving forward by dropping the publishing of regular dev updates; they sren´t really necessary anymore, we are not selling things in advance to warrant them nor plan to; we also think that AMS2 V1.6 is at a level of maturity to stand tall on its own without constant forecasting future developments. .

Our primary goal has and continues to be to make the game better, faster so it becomes more competitive to fund further development, in keeping that ball rolling we continuously aggregate more value to those of you who already own it the soonest. Anything that ultimately distracts or detracts from that goal or from that perception being reality isn´t actually worth doing.

This isn´t to say that moving forward we´ll be entering radio silence mode - we will still engage via social media, occasionally pop in the forum to contribute with objective answers to pertinent questions and the odd whistling emoji, and obviously in the Paddock Club where the day-to-day development grind takes place - while we obviously don´t want people leaking content and videos of updates before they are ready, it is perfectly alright for members to share news about bug fixes and improvements with non-members so that more information becomes common knowledge. And when release time approaches for a new update, we´ll have development overviews in text or video form to cover the progress that has been made.

With all this housekeeping well out of the way, let´s get on with what we are all here for!