What do you think is the most significant reason AMS2 userbase is so small?

Think positive! The smaller input lag from your shorter arms and legs gives you a clear advantage on the racetrack

 

plox, just remembered the scene, don't get offended lol

 

For my part, I simply find it hard to believe that any PC owner who is interested in sim-racing in 2022 (e.g., a person who owns any kind of steering wheel & pedals and who wants to get in touch with their inner Ayrton) has not heard of Automobilista 2. Reiza Studios, while a relatively small developer, has a very well-respected track record when it come to racing sims, and AMS2 has "Very Positive" review standings on Steam for all the world to see. Unless we're talking about a person who is either unwilling or unable to conduct the most rudimentary search on Google or YouTube, I think we can simply dismiss any arguments related to "not enough people know about AMS2" and that sort of thing.

For those who can afford it, iRacing--at the present moment--still continues to offer the most robust and complete multiplayer simracing experience available, despite whatever drawbacks simracers care to point out about the title. iRacing's phalanx of iRacers are also, truth be told, probably loathe to spend too much multiplayer time in other titles given their ongoing investment in iRacing. Additionally, ACC and rFactor2 both have well-established, if niche, multiplayer events that sync with various races across the motorsports calendar and receive more media attention than your average online race. The evergreen Assetto Corsa continues to seduce more than its fair share of multiplayer sim racers due to its unmatched modability.

In contrast, AMS2's multiplayer, by Reiza's own admission as well as our own experience, is more of a work-in-progress. Unintentionally, one of AMS2's greatest assets (i.e., a tremendous amount of wide-ranging content) also has the unfortunate side-effect of thinly spreading its userbase "like butter that has been scraped over too much bread", to borrow a phrase from an unlikely source. While not as large as AC, the motorsports world that Reiza has created is still quite wide-ranging and arguably more beautiful, yet sparsely populated. Probably the best one can do to improve the demographics of simracing is word of mouth and social media.

 

What I noticed from watching random Twitch streams is that people who try AMS2 for the first time really enjoy the game, love the FFB, the graphics, the performance.

However, soon enough AMS2 hits them left and right with bugs, bad MP and inconsistent AI. This seems to turn them down, so I rarely see them trying the game again after a couple of days.

It is like they go "cool game", but then it doesn't hook them up.

So I think AMS2 is a great sim, but it is so sparsely broken the replayability is damaged. If AMS2 AI was consistent, many players would stick with the game. If the MP was reliable I would say many more would get hooked up. But none of the two are well rounded quite yet, so people try it for a while, like it, but do not feel inclined to invest time in it.

 

I come back from time to time after the updates to see the progress but there's way too many annoying behaviours and missing features that would hook me too it over a long time.

The AI is way too bad to make it a good single player experience and the missing multiplayer features and small lobbys don't do it either.

everything feels unfinished. This starts on navigations via keyboard that work only 80% of the time but then some elements can't be reached, HUD / Notifications that are only editable about 80%,... small stuff that but it sums up. I really don't mind about new tracks and cars if the AI is that bad or no lobbys to race online are available.

Also not putting MP on the top development spot is a terribbly wrong decision by the devs imo. you can't become a serious player in the market without a good MP community. You'll stay niche like a NFS title. And with all the potential AMS2 has, this is really sad...

 

Content is not the problem, it’s the broken features that make it not enjoyable. The Ai was better before this latest build, not their like they have adhd and didn’t take their meds

 

Dont't forget about long standing bugs inherited from PCARS2 that are still harassing MP session like the once popular "Touristenfahrten", technically set up as a permanent traning session, where damaged cars stay visually damaged dto othere clients after repair, resulting in a grid of racing wrecks.

 

Last Friday, three cousins and me did a barbecue to watch Brazil parading in FWC2022 (and we were disappointed, to say the least... but the churrasco went fine)... all the three of them (two Italians and one Brazilian) are PC players and used to go to the Stockcar Brasil races... none of them knew AMS2 when I talked about it (paga eu, Reiza!).

AMS2 marketing is nothing more than this player base talking about it with other folks.

 

Same here: have a colleague who's a hardcore ACC and iracing player who did not even know AMS2 existed and what it is about

 

our community is in the process of our first league, and i gotta say it's a huge pain because the multiplayer setup in this game is atrocious, i doubt hardly anyone of our community will stay long term and we'll just move onto something else

 

Honestly with the newest builds, I think multiplayer issues might have gotten worse in AMS2.
Higher latency and worse netcode.

This is really disheartening. It's why my league rotates between AC, AMS2 and ACC. ACC being the best when it comes to setting up a multiplayer race. If AMS2 can get to ACC multiplayer state, AMS2 would be on the top of my list at all times.

 

It boils down to relying largely on word of mouth and online media... Reiza doesn't have the budget to force the brand on track side signs like other companies do...

And with word of mouth largely being negative due to the poor MP features and prediction... It is what it is...

 

We tried to build a community on Steam dedicated to AMS2 online racing. Reiza not only ignored our existence (what I'm not complaining, but just not a smart decision, specially because it was just a couple weeks after the 1.0 release and the userbase back them was, obviously, way worst than today) but did absolutely no effort to give us any support (even to, at least, do some sugar coating... "hey guys, we will work on these issues"... just to show that they care about their consumers).

At one side, Reiza team maybe is the hardest working among all devs, but for somethings they are completely negligent, inefficient or disinterested. Still like they don't understand how important a good online environment is. Even if it's getting better overall, still way out of target. Maybe it explain why there are so much sim players just ignoring AMS2.

Just think: ACC is far worst in content... iRacing had a huge paywall and is way worst in physics... but both sims have a way better online environment. Don't know how this can affect AMS2 sales, specially because I'm not into multiplayer as I was in the past, so am not the better person to judge it... but maybe people can tell if this correlation is true.

 

let’s say they really aren’t interested or don’t have the money to make MP correct. The single player Ai is terrible and trying to run a race with them is a nightmare. After 4-5 restart sessions, it’s get old and shut it down. You’d think they’d have that dialed in pretty well, but no.

 

Only Kunos in ACC era and the two console big studios (Polyphony and Turn 10) have money to really make difference in marketing (specially Plph and T10... way ahead from Kunos). Even iRacing practically have no marketing. PC racesim scene was always like that.

Personally, I don't know what they could do and can't say that Reiza is not doing right about it. Just pointed that their marketing is null as if I'm doing a Captain Obvious roleplay, lol

Can't agree about AMS2 AI being anything less than good. It's not the best, but is a TOP2 or 3 with easy. Just a little bunch of car/track combos that need some love.

What I believe is that a game should have a game. There is no engaging offline mode and the MP is considerably primitive. I don't know if Reiza can't or is just not interested in doing it, but in Race Department there is an amazing career app for AMS2 (that is close to what I see as ideal and engaging... way better than GT, Forza and even PCARS2 career modes... that are completely manure, IMHO) called Racing Life. The game will complete three years since 1.0 and still don't have not even a bad career mode and not a merely primitive multiplayer. I think that I'm not asking too much for a professional studio, that isn't in it's first release, to do things that amateurs already aced (considering the RSR online environment for AC and this career app for AMS2).

iRacing physics are bad, the AI from AC is a shame and ACC is not that much better... these three games are some undisputed successes... so, AMS2 can't need some miracle to get there.

 

I'm not saying they should waste development resources on marketing... Not in the slightest...

However you do know exactly what they should be focussed on to get that word of mouth into the mostly positive end of the scale...

One or the other would work brilliantly in moving the needle to the positive...

Although I will say that a up to date MP experience would move the needle the most... Mostly because all of the cars and tracks of a popular series would be needed to move the needle in the SP market enough IMHO...

 

I can tell you the correlation is not true as far as ACC is concerned. The content that Kunos have put out there in GT3 and GT4, different specs of cup cars including the ferrari challenge evo and the Huracan super trofeo, along with best in class laser scanned tracks and a VERY, VERY, VERY well BoP'd GT3 and GT4 class. This is what makes ACC so popular. The content is great, the physics are very true to life with regard to weight loading and steering feel. I can also do multi class endurance racing and save at any point and continue on from where I left off. I can do a Spa 24 hour, in a true 24 hour format. I can do 3 or 4 real life seasons of SRO GT Challenge (sprint or endurance), I can do a European GT4 championship or a British GT championship (mixed grid og GT3 and GT4. So don't come out saying ACC is far worse in content. Quite the opposite, and all AI is balanced across all cars and tracks.
So rather than making these assumptions, let's see what Reiza can learn from Kunos.

For AMS2 to take it to the next level in terms of users, there are a few things that need to be worked on. A more balanced AI to get offline players hooked.
A better BOP across classes, else, what's the point in having classes.
Mid race saves - allows users to get taken in offline in endurance or long format races/race weekends, before going online.
Mid race offline driver swaps for endurance races.

All this being said, I love AMS2 for what it is, a great sim with good quality content that just needs some tweaking. I play all the sims except IR, and at this point in time, ACC just nails everything correctly in its target genre. This single focus on GT racing and cup cars is what has helped it become so refined.
With AMS2, there is such a spread of random cars and classes, which is great for driving and sampling different cars, but is also a large step for Reiza to try balance all of these classes and cars across all tracks.

 

Haven't opened AMS2 since RF2 was added to LFM

 

That is the advantage of a very very very canned physics where you can make the same car do two different things in the same conditions in different tracks. The same car is different by track in ACC. That is not what simulation is about and anyway it is impractical in a sim with hundreds of tracks.
Having very much the same car across the entire sim with some small physics adjustments gives obvious benefits from this point of view.
Also, people tend to confuse "graphics true to life" with physics "true to life": they are not the same thing though humans tend to associate a lot more visuals with truth because vision is undoubtably the strongest of our senses together with touch.
IMHO what ACC does great is the "environment": the track, the car, the hands doing stuff, the sound (although some sounds are clearly edited to make them feel more "glorious"), the re-creation of the "season" and the format of SRO races, the mechanics of this racing (from the two races weekend to the rolling start to some of the color touches like brake discs and pads consumption) and stuff like that.
There are many things there that AMS2 could "rip", but I would also say those things would be more relevant/important in the future when some more of the basics are fixed.
When it comes to physics and FFB IMHO things in ACC are not at all that great, but on the other side Kunos has enjoyed a great deal of money, marketing and advertising by SRO and Fanatec and have invested heavily in streamers and content creators at all levels and that shows how powerful a tool is MP in combination with being in good relations with big content creators.
I also must note that more recently on twitch the amount of ACC streaming/streamers have dropped a lot. Most of the streamers that were on ACC and I was following aren't streaming anymore or aren't streaming ACC anymore. So I believe the hype is going down quite a bit, probably due to lack of variety and people getting bored out of that.