AMS2 vs IRacing rain hype: sponsored content creators sucks

I´ve been on record before about my distaste for influencers generally (which to be frank expands way beyond sim racing), but as far as sim racing influencers go I´m not sure any of them are actually paid to produce positive content about any given sim - I can tell you we definitely have never paid for such content and never would, but we still get plenty of spontaneous positive coverage so long as we´re putting out stuff that warrants sim racers (be them influencers or not) being positive about, so I wouldn´t immediately jump to that conclusion here .

It´s clear however there´s a slightly incestuous relationship going there between game developers and content creators in that when game developers put out new games / updates / content, there is an immediate incentive for influencers to create content covering it while interest in said developments is high - the content can be as milk-toast, run-of-the-mill and shallow as can be or just purely rehashing what the developer´s marketing lines are, they´ll still get clicks for it and for the sake of preserving their access they will tend to do just that, which generally encapsulates part of my distaste for it (even tho again we often also benefit from that same dynamic). Obviously the bigger the developer and the bigger their product, the more it attracts this sort of coverage. It´s just the nature of media products in the age of the internet.

It can be a bit bemusing to see iRacing promoting the introduction of dynamic weather as though they have just discovered a new planet with influencers pretty much beating to that same drum, when in fact 80% of what they´re offering now we already offered in AMS2 for quite a while. At the same time I´d be first to admit most of the credit for the weather system in AMS2 actually belongs to SMS rather than ourselves, and also the 20% iRacing has over our tech is actually quite impressive and very relevant to accurately simulating the effects of rain and weather in autoracing.

The good thing is we can always take the lead from such raising of the bar to further develop what we´ve got ourselves, and we are doing just that - already for the next update undertray aero will influence the amount of water spray getting kicked up, and for v1.6 there will be a bigger distinction between driving on and off the racing line in the wet both visually and in terms of driving dynamics.

How much Youtube hoopla there will be for it I guess we´ll have to wait and see but we know our users will appreciate it, and that´s enough for us