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

Maybe when the game is done and all DLCs and updates are complete; Reiza will release an AMS2 GOTY edition that includes all the DLC for a lower price. By then Reiza will be working on rolling out AMS3 on the next gen Madness engine. Until then, there are always Steam sales to capitalized on getting a good deals on AMS2.
The way I see it, DLC pays the bills for Reiza and keeps the lights ON. It helps them keep developing the game and bringing out constant updates.
I'm still of the opinion, realistic physics/tire model and a well designed and robust multiplayer will increase replayability and bring higher player numbers to AMS2. If a product is good people will pay for it.

 

I think, People rather like depictiions of "reachable" cars in games, Porsche Caymans, BMW M3, Subarus STI and Mitsubische Lancers etc.

I would like the idea to drive my Golf GTI on different tracks visrtually too., not only the two tours to Nords and Bilster Berg in 2020. But what I like most, is when Sims can bring me back my old cars from the past.
Currently only possible for me in Dirt Rally 2.0 and Forza Horizon 5.

I was quite hyped for the Polo TSI, only to find out that it's brasilian cousin has nothing in common with my wife's car. (110hp, 7 speed DSG) The real one is a lot more "sporty" and agile than the one in AMS2.

 

The street tires that Reiza releases will be very important to modders, as I think they use GT4 tires at the moment. This won't be important for most players as I don't even know if the mod cars work online but if there's potential for more street cars to arrive in this manner I'm all for it.

Obviously I'd prefer Reiza-made cars but while another 100-150 race cars could satisfy most categories that have ever existed, the number of road cars is basically endless...add a handful and then stick to racing. Leave chasing the moving target that is road cars to GT/Forza.

Nurburgring track days with Japanese street cars in AMS2? Maybe someday...until then AC will have to suffice.

 

I would argue it comes down to 3 things.

1. Jimmy Broadbent
2. "You can't put gameplay on the box"
3. Missed/unclear deadlines around the season pass along with it's immense cost.

1. I don't know exactly what happened between Reiza and Jimmy, but him refusing to cover this game flat out has definitely hurt this game's popularity. A lot of people flat out refuse to play it because their favorite YouTube influencer doesn't, plain and simple.

Plus. The videos he does have on AMS2 are less than flattering if a bit unfair and hypocritical IMO. A lot of the issues he brought up exist in other games, but he just chooses not to cover them. Instead focuses too heavily on Reiza who has maybe 1/5 the budget of the titles he's comparing too, and who has at least clearly attempted to fix the issues with several rewrites of the physics to this point.

2. Spreading out to other influencers, a lot of people describe AMS 2 as what Project CARS 3 should have been, and that comes with a certain amount of emotional baggage. People like me, who were flat out lied too by SMS twice (I still want my money back you ****s) wouldn't have given this game a look if I hadn't played AMS 1 first.

The adage, "you can't put gameplay on the box" comes to mind. For the people burnt 2-3 times by project cars, they see AMS2 as a continuation of that and want no part of it. Despite this game being x1000's of times better to drive and to play than PCARS 2. Reiza NEEDS to do something to educate people and advertise, and I think the VW demo was a good step. But street cars are AMS 2's weakest point IMO. Add a single formula classic car, and see if the turn around from the demo is higher? I bet you it will be!

3. The simple fact is, every single planned DLC has been late by a matter of months in some cases, incomplete, or just not released at all for whatever reason. (Where is the Nissans?) Granted, the DLC that have slipped through have been of extremely good quality and Reiza has been at least active with the community on what is going on behind the scenes. But, most people don't read that stuff, or care... From the outside, it looks like people payed $100 for a season pass or a Project CARS clone that has utterly stalled on the first major pack for over a year. (Remember, EVERYTHING in Racing USA was supposed to come out as 1 massive pack.) Instead we're getting 3 smaller packs, which is fine. But part 2 took several months to get out, and there has been nearly complete radio silence on part 3.

TLDR, Reiza needs to patch things up with influencers, get their DLC rolling out again, and get the best content in this game into the hands of more people to let the gameplay sell itself!

 

About Jimmy... I think that he only got frustrated (as a huge amount of people) that AMS2 don't play as AMS1 (what for me was a relieve because I since the very first release my impressions were that AMS2 is way better than AMS1). But that became an issue at the point that he begins to believe that he is some kind of racing expert, what his RL racing driver "career" is proving the opposite. And them he mounted this battle horse against AMS2. At least he tries to not roast Reiza and I prefer that he completely omits the game in his channel that do those lazy videos he did about it. But I wouldn't get surprised if someone proves that he did it just because Reiza didn't paid him enough.

BTW, if there is something Reiza is done terribly is marketing AMS2. And, yes, the FACT that they release and charged for incomplete DLCs is a very good reason for people to don't buy the game. Some of us have trust that Reiza will deliver great things, but most of people don't.

 

Oh yeah, I agree in the 2nd part 100% reiza has said this is a long term passion project and as far as that's concerned they've knocked it out of the park and I really think AMS2, should development continue, will become a landmark racing sim of the generation. But the average, casual sim racer see a Pcars clone with stalled out DLC and an apparently struggling dev. Reiza needs to fix that.

As for Jimmy, eh... I don't think you can accuse him (or Reiza) of failing to pay him off for a review. That's not right, regardless of what you think of him and I doubt he would do that considering how he panned both Grid Legends and PC3 which he got for free and or had a hand in making.

I can understand him saying AMS 1 and 2 don't drove the same, because until recently they didn't. That was 100% true, but what pissed me off is he can look at reiza and say all these things, and then ignore the exact same sort things in Iracing in the Audi R18 or Corvette DP.

Tire physics not being completely there and acting oddly in certain situations? That's what Iracing was famous for before this newest tire model! Yet, the only time he hammered this issue home? The DPI AMS 2 video

Too much grip in the wet? Beaten to death and into the afterlife in the Group C AMS 2 video dispite being the same basic physics as Pcars 2.

I could go on, but it was just very hypocritical of a man who I respect and trust when it comes to sim racing opinions, and again, at least reiza was actively trying and eventually did fix those issues. (For the most part, wet weather racing is still a little funky but no one has mastered that yet.)

 

What kind of numbers would AMS2 need to have for you guys to consider it a success? This is going to be a lot different from what Reiza thinks, since it sounds like they are doing very well (which is absolutely fantastic news).

Keeping in mind that sim-racing is very niche to begin with. If you look at AC, the vast majority of the 10,000ish regular players are treating it like Forza Horizon in Japan with better physics (which hilariously frustrates people at RD who want every mod team to be like VRC or RSS). Then you have ACC, which has around 4000ish regular players that are GT3 fanatics. After that you drop to the 750-player level of PC2, RF2 and Raceroom. Then at 500 you have AMS2.

I feel that 1250+ regular players is going to happen by the end of the year and it will steadily grow from there. As it gets bigger more content creators will emerge and it will grow further. Assuming they stick to their long-term plan and take AMS2 through 2023 at the current pace it should happen.

The PC2 stigma is only negative from a handful of hardcore sim racers...otherwise there would not be an equal number (or more) of players as RF2 and Raceroom. PC2 with better physics and more features (a few still missing but I'm sure they are coming) sounds like a good selling point to me. Sad to think about what could have been...but AMS2 hooked me the first time I took a Formula Vintage to Kyalami (which was a few minutes after refunding PC3 lol).

 

I'm thinking more a gaming success than a sim racing success.

If AMS2 doesn't sell 1,000,000 copies by the end of it's life, I would say it wasn't as successful as it should have been.

 

Can't imagine it would sell 1 million copies. That would generate $100 million in revenue which like an awful lot for a small developer.

 

One million copies is a lot for any game. We get used to giant numbers from AAA studios and the standout indie games but there can't actually be that many games (as a % of all games) that sell that well. Look at Grid Legends, they couldn't even give it away (it was free on Prime Day and the player count didn't budge...) and that game had some expensive licenses (for cars lol, they ran out of money for tracks).

In the end, it's more about sustainability. If you can sell enough copies to take care of your employees and continue to move toward your internal goals as a company, that is success. So if you look at it that way AMS2 *is* a gaming success (at least based on what was mentioned in recent updates) and it will be exciting to see Reiza continue to grow, hopefully independently and at their own pace.

Sure, PC2 had an incredible amount of licenses but at what cost? Forced to stop providing support/updates after a single year? What a shot in the foot. Then they took an extra year to put out PC3 which flopped hard and sunk the ship. The lesson here is not to take the fast publisher money if they force you to compromise your product.

I seriously think SMS was onto something huge with PC2. There is definitely a market for a multi-disciple racing sim but they are very difficult to get right and we see that with AMS2 development and also the PC2 flaws. Sure you can create any scenario you can think of in AC, but when all the cars stall on the grid or pit after the first lap it's a bit of an immersion breaker.

 

That is the reason why they must work on a proprietary engine for AMS3 or, at least, use one that didn't came from other racing sims. Wouldn't care if they took all that was done with Beam.NG in Torque3D, massage and turn it into a real game with that fine touch that Reiza knows better.

AMS1, also, suffered for being considered a clone of rFactor. I have to admit that was being turned off from it for a long time exactly because of it and needed a lot of convincing to even try the game.

I also don't think this is a "pay" issue... just wrote it because can't really understand why other than what he said (that "it's not like AMS1"), that is a sht reason, specially because he know that is was a long term project.

The problem, for me, is that he didn't, and still don't, have any clue about what is real in racing cars. All pro drivers that tried AMS2 (none of them are that much fans of Reiza) were largely consistent at pointing flaws in the simulator (what Reiza solved most of that stuff), but Jimbos opinion didn't even come close, just reinforcing that he didn't had a clue about what to say and sound more like the hater's eco chamber, as if copy/pasted complains and not having a personal opinion.

All sims at the market have physics that are very awkward at a great number of situations, but other sims use to be consistently wrong at the same points... as Reiza is the only one doing things in a certain (and realistic) way, fells like they are the wrong ones, but in the end is a lot of developers dealing with current tech limitations. But, yeah, iRacing is more awkward than all the rest, but I can understand that it have the same effect on professionals that play it as happens with DCS World (that I know some, and follow others, RL pilots that play it)... both sims have sht physics in few points... both sims enrage the pros that plays these... all those pros complain and curse de devs a lot... still, they come back because of the MP communities of these games are huge and, by different reasons, extreme functional. So people, in the end, cut a lot of slack for these sims.

PS: I could add ArmA3 here... but this is too much non-realistic for my taste and I refuse to call it a simulator.

Wet surface is one of the most technologically limited things done in any sim. People don't even need to attend to a class of Fluid Mechanics to understand how far this stuff is from being even acceptably simulated. I can only say that, at least, AMS2 and ACC (ACC more than AMS2) are funny when things go wet. But not even close to realistic.

Jimmy is an amazing entertainer. His talent to talk and sim-drive at the same time while being really good with both is something that you don't see very often. He is charismatic and fast in simulators (I hugelly recommend that he gives up all the racing he is doing in real life before get hurt... or hurting other people) and should stick with that. Failed every time that tried to go all technical over AMS2 because of it. Wouldn't be a shame... people like Pelé and McCartney also have this limitation, to only talk sht when get off their talent zone.

IMHO, the success is relative with the objectives of the project. If you do a game to sell X copies and have the expected profit with it, so selling X or more copies would be a success. But we gamers always compare a game with others. Overall, Minecraft, GTA5, Angry Birds, Candy Crush, Skyrim, Rimword, Stardew Valley and things like these are huge successes. Any FIFA or Call of Duty are great successes. Actually, all Forza and Gran Turismo are successes, but not as much as any Mario Kart (except the Double Dash, that still a successful game, but not as the others)... but from F-Zero to downhill, things become dark as we descend into the Virtual Motor Valley. Right at it's bottom lies all simulators that aren't made by Polyphony or Turn 10. Even AC (the classic one) won't sold enough to have even a little taste of sunlight, even if it's not stuck in the mud as practically all other of it's kind. Maybe the two first PCARS did better... I don't have the numbers and, honestly, don't care about SMS games, specially now that they were ate by EA and simply it's better that we make peace with the departure of this poor soul.

 

I have to completely disagree regarding influencers here. As a more mature sim racer, I couldn't give a rats what games a Youtube influencer/creator plays. To get a true sense of a sim and how good it is, you really need to look at unbiased reviews, or, join a discord chat on any given title and ask questions.
I have all titles, and some of the experiences these influencers claim is flat out wrong in some cases. They are biased, they are human. If their viewer base is on IR, they are NOT going to start bigging up ACC or AMS2 etc.
I have a channel myself as a hobby and I tell things as they are. I don't aim at viewers of any single title. Personally, I believe that all titles offer something to the player. I will say though, that lately I have been in AMS2 more and more. The latest updates have made a huge difference, and the guys in my ACC league are now playing AMS2 when away from ACC.
In my personal opinion, and being completely unbiased (and I am an ACC veteran), AMS2 has THE best driving experience in terms of FFB out of all sims out there. It is even better than the famous RF2 in the FFB department (which can be over-done at times).
Now if they can sort out driver swaps mid race and a few other bits, like mid race offline saves (this gets people playing offline endurance and a feel for the tracks) and if they can level the AI in the main series (Enduro prototype, Brazilian stock cars, GT1....as a starting point), they will grow the base even faster.

 

Yeah, but what's objectively the best way to judge a sim and what's being actually done are two very different animals.

If a YouTube sim racing channel has 800k people following it, you better hope he rates your game, because all these people are going to take notice. Jimmy basically has a monopoly, because all the other pure sim racing channels are all around 50-70k subs. There is no other place that can give that much publicity to an opinion, and that does matter a lot, especially with a game that, to be honest, has only become truly great within the last few months and was notably flawed before.

 

Jimmer's criticism a year ago had some validity to it about the tyres being too soft, even if presented in a crappy way, but then it became a personal feud with Renato that he refuses to let go and his mates/chat still snidely post crap about AMS2 in stream chats and his Discord.

It's the same thing with GamerMuscle, no matter how much the physics are improved he has to nit-pick and find something wrong about it (usually easy as he insists on running every sim with sub-300 wheel rotation regardless of the car and runs MP lobbies in 5 C track temperatures then complains about lack of grip) because his brand is to bash AMS2 and its developers.

It's more like tribalism and bullying at this point. In general I've unfollowed and stopped caring about most YT sim racing influencers because they're almost all like this.

 

With the Broadbent section I agree, but I'm not sure that's a fair assessment. GamerMuscle has made several positive videos about AMS2. He does have kind of an AC complex and seems to regard that as the best thing that will ever happen, so every sim is judged on how close it comes to the AC behaviour, but that, to me, seems like a genuine opinion (even if I don't agree with it).

It has worsened after he drove an actual race car (not at all on the limit) and found that, if you drive 5 seconds slower than what's actually possible, it seems like there is no sliding at all.

 

Idk if you watch his rare AMS2 streams but they always go like this:

1. He constantly switches devices around in his extremely complicated rig so when he fires up AMS2 it doesn't recognize his wheel/pedals. He spends 45 minutes on stream fiddling with it as the baying mob mocks AMS2 in the chat.

2. Once he finally gets it to work, he picks a totally random car (with an old tyre model) at one of Oulton Park/Brands Hatch/Donington, probably at 5 C track temps in the winter. The car is very slidey and he starts complaining about "the physics" and doing random counterproductive setup changes, usually involving setting rear wing to 0 because "it's faster".

3. He gets punted on lap 1 of the race, gets salty and starts complaining and mocking AMS2 fanboys.

4. He quits and goes to play AC or iRacing.

 

Good guy Jimmer is irrelevant at this point (in the AMS2 perspective), especially since his real world adventures.
I'd say he has branched out to something else than sim racing.
It's best that him and Reiza ignore completely each other, and that's what is happening.

What's important is that AMS2 continues to sell at a steady pace in coming years, and I think it definitely will, as it is refined, more content and featured added, multiplayer developed, extensive career more, etc.
It's already a tad more successful than AMS1 ever was.

 

It's like half sim and half real life stuff currently, but he doesn't really seem to do opinion pieces on anything anymore, it's even more about entertainment than it previously was.

As said before, I think we are on a good way for that, just there's going to be no significant push by anyone other than Reiza and mouth propaganda.
1.4. will increase the user base because it will get some publicity and several people are going to try the changed cars (by then it will be all cars so no option to just accidentally come onto one that isn't improved) and be surprised how much different (better) they are. There also has been a tendency recently that the released updates are more stable (also because of the release candidate process), that will help a lot as well. If they add something like safety cars, that would provide a HUGE incentive for people to try it out again, but ovals alone are probably going to do that.

I don't think that we are going to get anywhere near 1,000 daily users by the end of the year, but something like 700-800 is possible.

And to compare with AMS1, that is really an encouraging comparison, especially if you look at figures like steam reviews or even current steam charts. Especially if you take into consideration that AMS1 was already a very stable game upon release, because it had been developed as Game Stock Car Extreme for several years. Reiza had built a very good foundation there. In terms of that comparison, I think that we are still in the Game Stock Car days with this engine and that the comparison to AMS1 is a bit misleading, at least in terms of how much Reiza have got to grips with the engine.

Maybe with 1.4 we're going to enter AMS1 territory.

 

The problem with Jimmy and the likes is that they are after the easy clicks/views and they want to do it piggyback on someone else's job in an unfair way (i.e. in a way that maximizes the clicks but it is not generally fair review). That happens with those developers that do not contribute to their channel visibility in a wide range of ways: from a full week end to the finals of a certain series, to a full weekend in Germany to test an up and coming simulator, to being part of special events where only big streamers are invited. Unless a developer qualifies for that (which is what makes money for JB and the likes) what they get is superficial reviews where they can't be arsed to prepare their hardware or even learn where they can check if their tires are not overheating.
It's not a conspiracy, just business driven by $$$$...

 

In order to take a review seriously, the reviewer needs to be focused on the car behaviour, expected behaviour and be able to communicate that. I focus on this in any videos I create that are review based (I try to at least) and I talk about how the car feels, what its doing, what it feels like and do I feel all this through the steering wheel and visual cues.
For me, my channel is an extension of my hobby and I share my opinions on these things, but again, I back up these opinions in a clear to understand manner by explaining this.
Some YouTubers will chase clicks first, and they will also feed the userbase more of what they want...such as being very pro "sim x" while bashing everything else. This just creates many problems for new people coming into sim racing.