Ah yes. The man who lied and even made fun of people that criticized pc3 before the release of that mess. The man who don't know simracing anymore. The man who got a Alienware rig from the biggest a hole in simracing Ian bell. You my friend are absolutely not entitled to have an opinion in simracing anymore.

If you are paying thousands of dollars just for the equipment alone while iracing costs another couple of thousand for all the content to play a game that cannot even improve a terrible tire model and pretend this is normal, then you're a nut.

The main reason why sim racing e-sport never took off is simple imo. Our favorite genre is divided between sim and simcade. And the sim racing market itself is divided between too many games, none of them being significantly better than all the competition on all aspects. No gaming genre as a whole (FPS, fighting, STR...) has ever met success in e-sport. Only a handful of individual games : CS, Street Fighter, Starcraft 2... Even the MOBAs' and CCGs' successes can be reduced to 2 games representing each of those genres. And EA Sports games simply have little to no competition. There's just no room for 10 differents games pretending to offer the best platform for competitive sim racing. It's kinda sad but we need one major release dominating the competition, making us all flock to it. Viewership for events would follow. Iracing streams will never be more popular, given its business model. To be popular, an e-sport needs to be based on a game everyone can play. That's part of the appeal, knowing the game and being able to appreciate how better the guys you're watching are at it. Iracing will always be a niche sim destined to people dedicated to this hobby. This is not enough to gather a large viewership, especially when the market offers so many other good sims. The Codemasters F1 games prove this : it sells more, so it gathers more viewers.

This was a pleasant surprise. Clear, concise, and constructive. Selfishly, this makes me feel better about the dumbass league friends and I crash in and it's small following. I think another issue that Racing eSports runs into is how cold they are. I find it difficult to identify with anybody playing because there's almost no interaction or personality with the drivers; the biggest pull a League can do for me is a good commentator, and even then, that's like only watching F1 for Brundle. I'd much rather watch 20 selfish assholes push each other out of the way with their own liveries rather than this meaningless team setup.

got confused about some parts of this, didn't realize this was made pre-covid lol

I wouldn't say teams are a completely moot point. They're good for running endurance races as well as sharing setups and tips among friends. Not everybody who runs or joins one is a LARPer, just look at the results of any endurance event on iRacing and half the team names are memes.

This is where you're wrong. The death of something insinuates it ever had life.

The older I get the more annoying and unwatchable I find the youTube gamer scene to be. So I always get stoked to see you talking about something like this. The gamer market is brutally short sighted and everyone acts like the next big thing is right around the corner. Look at how dumb so many consumers are about games, like.. literally every EA sports KZfaqr freaking out about how the new $60 game is exactly the same but worse just like the past 7 years. Every game is either exploding or "dying out" there's never a middle ground, especially with sim racing

The main reason I got a rig was because I enjoy the skill of learning how to drive fast and drive well. Also this is the closest I can get to using an arcade cabinet without having to drive 45 to 50 minutes out of town.

IMHO it boils down to the simple reason that you can just watch real racing and every aspect of it is better. I mean why should the audience even watch sim racing e-sports instead of the real thing? There are no benefits. Beginning with the production quality. Trackside cameras are often just the prebaked camerapaths of the replay function instead of multiple professional camera man. There isnt a somewhat highly paid live director who knows how to entertainingly cut between the cameras. The commentators do their best but are often lacking in comparison. Then the stakes are just really low compared to a real race. Oh no, virtual car #14 had a crash and teleported back to the pits. No body gave a fuck. Also there isnt really the fascination of people doing things you cant do physically, mentally and mainly because of lacking money. I will never participate in eg a real WRC race. With simracing, i just hop into fucking AC/Dirt/whatever which costs less than literal dirt on a sale and thats it. Surely i need a Wheel for enjoyment which costs a bit more but who watches sim racing esport and doesnt own one? So why should i watch a shitty stream when i can do the same shit for myself right away? The only virtual race streams i watched were from people like oggy, nikki thiem, jimmy and the like. But i watched those mostly because of their personality and not because of the race. The live banter, shittalking with mates or interaction with the community is where its at. Then most people in the races are just some fucking nametag. I dont give a shit about them because i dont know anything about them. Why should i route for "ifcukdyourmom" instead of "xxxdrag0nsl4y3rxxx" or the likes? So we already established that sim racing esport doesnt do anything better than the real thing. But it also doesnt bring anything new to the table? Big esports titles mostly do things which cant be replicated in real live. Shooting eachother to death most likely wont happen on live tv in near future. What is even the equivalent of abstract stuff like lol or dota. Chess on steroids? idk but thats my point. Fucking Mario Kart has a better chance to be a big esport title because it distinguishes itself fairly well from normal racing. Also almost everybody playd it at some point and has a glimpse of an idea why something that is happening on the toplevel is awesome compared to their own shitty abilities. Simracing will never be big esport.

Cannot wait for your Rennsport review dude

I definitely laugh at the "professional teams" and have always wondered, does Ray Alfalla have a job, or is iracing his job?

Unfortunately, I totally agree. I just love to play these games but hate to watch. However, I think that the scenario can improve using game tools like selecting which driver or cam to follow and this can only be done using the game engine and it does not inflate social media views

If NASCAR were to partner with Gran Turismo or Forza again to form a league, they might get some decent viewership. Those titles have fairly large communities and both platforms are much more attainable compared to iRacing. But I guess the "realism" of iRacing is more important to them.

Nobody is gonna watch stupid fucking internet races regularly. The games are fun to play. That's it.

NR Night In America, a fun, almost daily-ish league by IDK Player consistently gets a little under or MORE views than 10k for his streams. This is just a bruh moment

This is a sad truth, I'm a low-level competitive simracer myself and I don't see how teams and organizations at the top of my platform (rF2) can afford to pay anyone, all the while... Thy do exactly that. Only thing I disagree with is your point on teams. I'm in a certain league (won't say names) where every driver in the league's 4 tiers has to pay 20+ euros to compete in the season, but all of that money only goes to paying out the drivers' prizes in the top tier... People are still wasting egregious amounts of money on it, now most of the marketing happening on my platform is just from smaller sim manufacturers. Though I disagree with your points about the teams. You *can* do it all yourself, but not everyone can. Teammates can potentially develop setups faster together and there are people who are really specialized who join higher-level organizations to help Edit: Almost forgot to add, I'm witnessing a ROBLOX(!) racing league getting more views on it's streams and VODs than 90% of sim leagues... Lol

There’s too many random series in random cars on random games. I agree with other peoples sentiments that many of these leagues would benefit from merging into a couple big series that are offered for viewing in a centralized way.

I think the key here is what you mention about we, sim drivers, dont even consider watching F1 or GT just because we dont consider them simulators. This creates a gap between our community and the vanilla reality of car fans (and those, i guess most of them dont consider us real drivers, just videogame people). We have to close this gap. Austin, on another viewpoint, if you care, i think we need to talk about how sim racing is a kind of "pay to win" model. I live on a poor country and started racing with a 15in laptop. And i use to use "driver line", not because i dont know where to brake, but to have some kind of "feeling" of depth on track. Then, when i got up on iracing, a lot of races dont support this (and some leagues too). I see a lot of people complaining that a "real" sim racer dont need this (and even that this doesnt help), but they turn off. Just when i got my VR, i suddenly got better, because i finally could see the track. Thus, the "pay to win" mechanic is outside the simulator, but on the gear. Another taboo topic is about iracing incident count. Its great if you are a great driver and want to have 30-45 min race, but i feel joy playing with MX5 and its horrible to be penalized when someone that is one lap down crashes on my back, giving me 4x and lowering my SR. Dont you think iracing could get this system better? On those low levels race, for example, you often see people going off track then rejoining without proper care and crashing on others. Dont you think iracing could improve this? People get up on their licenses without even knowing the basics on track. Tks for your attention and congratulations on another good content! =)

I think Sim racing needs to hold a tournament with completely randomly chosen tracks, and weather and only allow the drivers to adjust a few things with the car. Allow no outside help and only give these people limited practice. Live race-per-race officiating with very clear rules. If guys drive dirty it's on them. But have it be as neutral as possible. Have like a $20 to 60 dollar entry fee and let the event begin. Pay the top 100 prize money. Good prize money.

I love watching the community lose their shit... i love acc... i used to like iracing.. but watching all these karens hating simply because u point out the truth. Its fucking priceless.. keep up the work bro.. and download a pop filter and deesser

The purpose of teams, in theory at least, is that it's much easier for an organisation to obtain and keep sponsors since, in theory, the organisation exists regardless of who's driving for them and for a company paying money to have their brand displayed it's a much easier pill to swallow.

IDK man, I love racing, things with wheels in general, video games, watching races and commentary, I have (been lucky to) had a FFB wheel since I was a kid in 2004, and yet... I can't get myself to watch the more 'official' sim racing events. It always felt so serious and awkward. It felt like they were recreating 'real' races, when they should have just embraced the fact that sim racing is in its essence just Video Games, and kept it fun. Just think of the number of views that a lot of sim racing youtubers get on their races.

Eyyy he's back!

It was a short lived hit during pandemic, now it is just an expensive hobby, so no kids can afford to do it. Learning curve is steep and just by watching others, you can't really get any useful info. Until there is some remote control reality where PC users could drive cars on road, there is no gain in this branch...

I assume teams are like orgs, where they can sponsor you and basically make you an employee. You get more practice time, since practice is your job and they pay for traveling, which is important on high levels because international travel is expensive. That’s why Smash, Street Fighter and even Simracers have orgs. You can absolutely go solo, it’s just harder.

On the teams point, would teams give their drivers money in order to be able to take care of themselves and be able to keep driving for them?

Posted a month ago yet based before covid, sim racing has exploded

Compare it to Smash tournament view counts. Hell, I'd like to see the metrics for LMS IRL vs. simulated!

While I do agree with the main point (sim racing is "dead"), as far as viewership goes, how do you see the Twitch impact on numbers? Clearly for some series the "place" to watch is Twitch, not YT (ESL R1). And while Covid gave a spark to the sport in 2020/2021, currently it all regressed to 2019 levels, that were already declining.

9:33 I can draw... But those softwares are hard to use for me personally... I have to write custom code to get what I want done ...

I think there are plenty watching and participating…it’s just that the community is saturated with leagues …if some of the league’s would merge I think we’d see the participation levels grow…but imho it’s like when a political party of the same or similar mandates break up forming toe parties splitting the vote…esports needs to consolidate…and there is a decent Canadian following…however Canadians are sidelined in most of the competitions, we’re omitted, disallowed and discouraged from any meaningful competition…imho there when we’re next door neighbours

That DC Solar shade 😂😂😂😂

I lost interest and went back to playing tennis IRL. Got tired of sitting on my ass all the time.

Check your sound levels during editing man this is so quiet.

Nobody's going to watch if the names aren't familiar. People follow *people* more than brands.

Id rather have F1 be considered a simulator and have fun with views, It's not like NFL 22 is super realistic lol they don't even have first person.

Salty but hard to deal with

Mostly agree but there are teams in esport for solo players in RTS games, arena shooters and sports ports. The point of the team is to get visibility for their fans and sponsors and your incentive for joining is the salary and/or the added value. Let's not kid ourselves and think most people can afford a high end computer and high end sim gear, which, even if not necessary will always be chosen by the top players who want less variance. Teams have had "training" facilities for some time now. Reality tv has more viewers than most football games; is reality tv a better football game ? Dont' reach :p

Why watch video game racing when I can watch real racing? I like racing in simulators because I can't do it in real life. I can turn on the TV and watch nascar.

thrustmaster lol, that name will never not make me crack up

>crying about your divorce is a bigger esports than simracing lamo

Why would anyone watch? One of the issue's involving SimRacing eSports, is the fact.. why watch simulated racing, when you can just.. watch real racing? especially if its GT's, BTCC and so forth. It's basically like asking a bunch of racing fans to give a crap about a very niche and obscure genre. Ask the average person what is Sim Racing? or what is eSport racing? Majority of them will shrug and laugh, why would they care? the overall image of 'racing esports' is.. arcade games. You can blame Gran Turismo for that, considering it labels itself the 'real' driving simulator, when.. its nothing like driving the actual cars. It's closer to Need For Speed than anything. It looks pretty, its fun! hella fun, but.. thats the image thats slapped onto the entire genre. Furthermore, Sim Racing, again is a very niche and.. arguably expensive Genre. We might look at the entry level wheels, pedals an so forth and think, not expensive. Ask the average joe if they think Logitechs G29 is 'reasonably priced' - for in their mind, its a cheap plastic bit of tat for playing toy cars.. that costs £200. Most will scoff at that, nevermind the rest of the offerings, like my rig in total is about £7000, including rig, pedals, base, wheels, seat, screens and the PC. It's not exactly a genre that the average joe will dive right in on and the G29 offers a very, well, arcadey experience. Not bashing it, just looking at it from an outsiders perspective. So the average joe will think, ah.. this feels like crap, feels nothing like a car and I paid £200 for this?? ( Remember, the average joe wont be watching SRG or some such for 'reviews on this that' or thinking, snag a second hand one. Most people who buy a G29, tend not to realize they can get a second hand one for little to nothing, in good nick too. ) Now add eSports into the mix. Who wants to watch a bunch of kids and old guys, maybe a few girls here an there, stare at a screen for an hour or so, whilst half the field gets taken out by very.. uh unrealistic dive bombs, wipe outs and course.. bugs galore! finally. People don't want to waste their time on something so, well.. not as exciting and interesting as the real thing. You watching it in person or on a screen.. is just, no different, its exactly the same. Compare that to the real thing, watching it in real life is.. electrifying, the presence of the track and the sound, the smell and sensation of the cars wipping past at high speed, watching drivers battle it out before your very eyes where one mistake could result in, well.. not a 'reset to track' or, a car bouncing and rolling then driving on, but.. race over scenarios. racing eSport just.. wont ever have that same presence. It wont be able to reach a wider audiance, it'll mostly just stick around WITHIN the niche genre and even then. Most sim racers would rather race than watch the race.

I didn't know Cars Tour had a esports league. Probably didn't get growth because the actual late model series is just a small series on the east coast.

When talking about viewers you conveniently omitted Virtual Le Mans with 81 million and GTR24H with over 400 million 🤔🤫

Facts.

There is no real life Rocket league or Fartnite. There is real auto racing and it’s more exciting to watch then sim racing. Let’s face it. Id love you to debate the Sim Pit on this topic. Sim racing esports is dead, let it die. Let’s talk about software and hardware and all the fun that can be had in cars other then GT3s.

Why would we watch esports when we can participate?

I don't see eSports in general as something for viewers, except for those who compete in it. The only reason to sponsor is to get other players to buy the product. Most regular eSports viewers don't really care about sponsor products unless it's something that will help them in a game.

i only watch a sim racing match is the replay of my own race. Watching others' match is really dull.

Interesting Video, but consider this: Player online at the time of writing this comment Rocket League across all platforms - 198 000 (activeplayer io estimate), of which all could be potentially interested. Iracing - 9500 of which not all are oval drivers who would be potentially interested in the peak series. With that in mind 10k vs 300k views makes more sense. A question IMO that would make a more interesting video is why nobody cares about simracing as a whole, not just sim esports.

Want to skyrocket the sim racing e-sports viewership to oblivion? Just let: Amouranth, Pokimane, Neekolul, Belle Delphine and many e-thotzs more, participate in skimpy outfits and it will be like the Superbowl to the simps. Obviously it will be a wreckfest but...oh well

So what do you think about Rennsport? DOA? Btw 20K views: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/eNeng82ivM24fmw.html :D

Gran Turismo events seems to attract a decent number of people. Besides the games being wildly uneven in quality, there's also the problem with personalities - most sim racers have the personality of a door, or they are flat out crazy. In other games, you have charismatic people playing. Just check out some World of Tanks community contributors, for example, like Skill4ltu and Claus Kellerman. They are fun, affable people.

Sim racing has every issue to hold it back tbh. Equipment costs are ridiculous unless you're ok running on a Logitech G29 or entry level Thrustmaster wheel, dipping your toes in it is difficult because unless you're playing iRacing, every online game is filled with griefers and joining a league is a big commitment, online populations are fairly low, sometimes falling even lower than other "Dead" genres like fighting games and watching them is just not entertaining. Partly because the direction is ass and obviously because you could just watch the real deal instead. While games like Gran Turismo are basically the closest you can get to a popular simracer, having a terrible handling model and a childish playerbase even takes care of that. So yeah, folks! Sim racing is never gonna be popular and it's only got itself to blame.

the sale however of simracing gear is exploding ... so at least the sport is not dead

Why would people watch Sim racing, They don't watch Real Motor sports. The only watch motor racing is F1, Indy car and Nascar.

Literally was talking to my friend about this last night.

But of course nascar is the older one Tracks never change, cars are the same easy to model it

Well I mean, anyway…

Racing just isn't as popular as football or basketball. Thus why it isn't as big as those.

You talked about teams being silly, as an ACC driver teams are super helpful bc you need to swap drivers for endurance racers, teams can also help setup your pit strategy and car while you're racing. I agree with all your other points though

Lol, the facebook group forbids mention of Forza and GT, while still promoting the heaping pile of garbage that is RBR. What a joke.

A game is and remains a game if you like to do it, that's all that matters, the rest is crap bullshit speech

why are not mentioning the 400 million global viewers gtr24h claims? :D

It's such a weird position because if it were done right, there could be a MASSIVE series, but it would requires tons of money and proper teams to take care of every sector. GT:S or GT7 would probably have the highest possible chance at a sim racing series taking off massively, but it would have to be done right. - And lets just straighten something out real quick, Gran Turismo, Forza and pretty much any other racing game that's based on real cars, tracks and physics (regardless of how close they come to reality (and who the fuck are most sim racers to say what's realistic when 98% of them don't race irl)), they ARE sims. They are by definition, simulations of driving, only a fucking idiot would disagree with this, or someone with so large of an ego it's bigger than Mt Everest. Point is, I'm not certain on this but I feel like a lot of these orgs and coordinators are just in it for the quick money grab from sponsors. They never pull huge numbers, but they're also not advertised. Where does the sponsor money go from these HUGE sponsors? Like Nvidia for example, or Intel. Where exactly did their money go? It sure as shit didn't go into advertisement or marketing, hell I wouldn't be surprised if they spent millions on these event coordinators and the EC's invested as little as $250k in their series, meanwhile they pocket $1m+. Something just doesn't add up, advertise a series on TV, buy TV time slots internationally, plan it a year ahead, run registration and qualifyings, get the servers, get the production team, run a series and bring in huge numbers. Make it easy for viewers to understand what's going on and it would likely take off.

You're right. Esport sim racing should have been just hype for the 1 driver, never teams or members etc.. all the glory to just the driver. Would have been easier to popularize

The new Gran Turismos can provide some amazing racing online once ur in the higher ranked lobbies

The return of the shittiest microphone ever.

a weird hobby for old men? huh?

Man did a whole vid on this, sad man

I’m not a sim racer so I’ve got no skin in the game but still trying to understand the pint of this video………. As far as I can tell the point is just to say “Hey I think it’s stupid and here are some stats to prove it” In your spare time do you drown puppies and tell kids there’s NO Santa?

Austin, I found your channel a few days ago. At first it seemed good, now I wonder. You sound like someone who tried to make it big in sim racing but didn't quite make it. I don't know you in iRacing or any other title. I do hear a lot of negative from you in the videos that I have watched. Let's go back to 2020 and the pandemic. As Bruce Jones called it "full metal racing" was at a standstill. Sim racing filled the void for a lot of fans, it gave people something racing to watch. Yes, eSports grew at that time, and I knew it would tapper off over time. And I'm sure it has. The only series that I follow is the dNLS or in German, Digital Nürburgring Lange Strenke Serie. I follow the NLS & the 24 Hours of the Nürburgring in real life as well as 24H Series, WEC, Australian SuperCars, and some IndyCar races. I just can't get into IndyCar the way I did in the 1970's & '80's. I also run AI racing in iRacing since I too am tired of the way Division 1 drivers act towards lower ranked drivers, being told to get off the track and to stop messing up their race. Why can't you find anything positive in sim racing. Or has your day job ruined sim racing for you?

Virtual racing always looks stale and ganky compared to the real thing. Why watch some unfit dude drive fake cars when you can watch actual people putting their lives on the line. Not sure if i agree that its dying, it never was all that big a deal to begin with. Also, the good esports all present a game that cant be played in real life/ a different strategy to real life. Sim racing is not distinct from real racing.

Not sure i would listen to the opinion of a guy whos mic sounds like its from the 80s

Or he’s wondering why someone would watch someone else simrace instead of actually playing a simracing game himself

Simracing esports cringe :D

I hear what you are saying, but... why would the focus on e-sports and making good games be mutually exclusive? I don't see how they relate at all. E-sports involves marketing and community managers... not developers. Has literally nothing to do with the quality of the game/sim. Of course Sim-Racing gets obliterated by basically any other topic in viewership... Sim-racing is _very_ interesting to _very few_. Real world events are orders of magnitude more interesting, relevant and relatable to orders of magnitude greater crowds. If you compare amount of views against size of pool, sim-racing actually does _incredibly_ well, compared to those chicks gushing about their failed marriages... As for the marketing push into e-racing being cringy: Yeah, agreed. But, dude... why wouldn't they try? And what's the harm? Like, who cares? It's literally something you can completely ignore with zero consequence to yourself or anybody else (I know; I do that). Basically, why does this bear complaining about?

Damn dude you hate Racing E-sport lol

Its just not interesting. Grass growing is more interesting. Its a great, fun, game now a spectator sport. A game ! PLAY THE GAME DONT WATCH THE GAME... DAHHHHHH

No one is interested in dweeb sports.

I strongly disagree iracing esports is Alive and well

No body cares Austin what you have to say :)

Clickbait old ass video

igs52 #vur.fyi