Both types of games represent very dedicated and difficult styles of racing, so even styles of racing which have actual difficulty barriers are able to find an audience. F1 and Dirt Rally are the only focused Codemasters racing games, and they're the only ones really working, business practices of greed aside. Relying on potentially a super hardcore audience when you're making a more accessible racing game isn't grounds for it doing well, as we've seen. That means only the super hardcore of racing fans will consider those titles, and almost always on a sale as they'll likely be playing other racing games instead. They're more of titles to pick up when you're looking for something simple, like a break game between releases of interest. I don't say this as a knock but both GRID 2019 and Dirt 5 are akin to mobile titles (not in production values so please don't take that from my comparison) in the sense that they're average and exist in a sea of more particular, standout games. The Dirt series has taken the core part of offroad racing and segmented that into a side series, so the main games are just "Offroad GRID." And GRID too failed to grab an audience. It helps it has nothing else similar in that lane. You know from the type of game that it is, that it's going to be chaos when you race, and the game embraces that entirely. And that's because it focuses completely on the idea of being a destruction derby game. Wreckfest, which is more of an arcadey destruction derby game, has an audience. For offroad games, it has competitors, and even better examples, within its own IP. But what does it actually do with it, that for example, Forza Horizon cannot do with its track editor system? I made the Trackmania comparison because it seems to be focusing heavily on creating tracks, and there's already a crazy game for that. I mean, people play Rocket League, so it's not like on PC everything has to "be a sim or else." The issue is with Dirt 5, what's the identity it has? It's an offroad racing game that tries to go for a colorful extreme sports approach. I don't think sim or arcade racers have a large divide. Will this matter in a year or two when Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport likely have their games out? Right now the edge Dirt 5 has over many other racing games is it's one that has upgrades for the now-current generation of platforms, but honestly, that's about it. Even Dirt 5's playground mode, which seems like it will capitalize on the games more "extreme sports" spin, is something you already get in games that might better encapsulate that type of crazy stuff like Trackmania. Not everyone plays everything, people stick to particular titles. It's a game that exists, and in the world of racing games, it's slowly evolved into fighting games. Project CARS 3 suffers this same problem. F1 2020 represents what's likely the most popular license in motosports today. Dirt Rally 2.0 is probably the most comprehensive rally sim outside of the current WRC games which are all timed-exclusive to the Epic Games Store so its direct competition is on a store people avoid using. Competizione is focused primarily on the GT World Challenge and focuses deeply on GT3 cars more than any currently supported game. Assetto Corsa has crazy mod capabilities, meaning its current limitations is what the community can make of it. If you look at the games that get more players - F1 2020, Dirt Rally 2.0, Assetto Corsa Competizione, and even Assetto Corsa (this might be one of the oldest sims still having a large userbase and it's recently had numbers that show up the other games) - they all offer something other games lack. What's Dirt's future when it started as a rallycross game and that's now been migrated to a side series that's eventually going to be used as a different IP to boost? It seems people are more invested in Dirt Rally and that series will die off when it becomes World Rally Championship when Codemasters/EA gets the license in a few years. I think one of the problems Dirt 5 has is.just who exactly is it for? On PC, it only recently got wheel support and even then it has some teething issues.
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