The November Postmortems: Filling Up The Grid

There is a beauty to auto racing that doesn't exist at the highest level of pro sports, as much as it's been swept away in a few series as of late. Anybody who could pony up the cash, had the means, did all the paperwork would find themselves on the entry list of any racing series in the world; including Formula 1. A part of that mentality was the idea that not every team, name, and face that showed up would get the same the same level of media attention and treatment as the other, more established names or fellow new faces to come on the grid before they revealed what they were made of. Spire Motorsports for the longest time did have that higher level of media attention within the NASCAR Cup Series, but it took years before their labor did start to bear sustainable fruit with Carson Hocevar making the most of that in his career thus far. In the mid-90s of Formula 1, the big developments heading into 1994 was the introduction of Simtek and Pacific with the latter being a powerhouse in the junior categories up to that point; before both teams were simply not able to make the venture stick for various reasons.

That ability for anyone to heed the call, take on the challenge, and in this case create the video game of your vision makes the industry special in ways that's no longer possible in Formula 1, the NASCAR Cup Series, or at Le Mans. We had two names make that step up much like Simtek and Pacific did more than 30 years ago and much like those two, Project Motor Racing and Rennsport did not make the impact they were hoping for. PMR, much like Pacific, were the heavyweight taking up the challenge; though it's foray into F1 was as much of a nightmare as was the launch of Straight4 Studios' title. Rennsport has always been the more quiet newcomer into the realistic racing space, having been around for some time in lieu of it's usage in ESL and it's free-to-play model that relied on a battlepass and microtransactions didn't inspire confidence or much reason with the game itself not bringing much to the table, at least not yet. That free-to-play model would be ditched over the Summer, with a formal video game release having happened in November that, much like Simtek's foray in Formula 1, didn't go off with a bang, but a whimper.

It's been a fascinating journey watching Rennsport develop to where it is today from afar. A clean sheet design running on Unreal Engine 5 that was first announced in 2022, Rennsport was the first true new face on the realistic racing scene in a long time and immediately set itself apart from the establishment through it's esports focus at the forefront. It also saw to set itself apart by seeking to monetize the work done by modders in the game and be the first racing game in the space to truly have players digitally own the cars that they use in the game. This would bring people to associate Rennsport as being among the first racing games that incorporated the Web3 ponzi scheme known as Non-Fungible Tokens, though that direct link was vehemently denied by Rennsport CEO Morris Herbecker in interviews. The individual cars people buy and use having their own eVIN and logbook is a neat idea in terms of a new way of stat-tracking, but that further idea of Rennsport having a focus of digital ownership and financialization makes it hard to shake the idea that it is still at some level, a Web3 scam; as was noted by that anonymous 4chan poster mocking the launch of Project Motor Racing in the previous postmortem. Ultimately, who asked for that in their racing game other than those who believe that Web3 isn't a monkey sink and then deny such initiatives are running rivers dry or exponentially increasing the cost of electricity?

The dubious public perception would prove to be hard to shake in the following years. With a part of Rennsport's focus being esports first, it does make sense to partner with ESL to be it's racing game of choice and is a good place to build that core and gain feedback. The problem comes from the fact that ESL is owned by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund. The fund, which now owns Electronic Arts in partnership with Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners, has itself the public perception of being used to sportswash and feign ignorance of the country's atrocious human rights record, including the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018. What does it say about a developer willing to work with that kind of blood money, at least until they split with ESL in March of this year? And again, Rennsport would be put in the position of denying such assumptions regarding their funding through an interview in May. This would be the third time the team would have to defend itself from controversial accusations; after allegations of Rennsport stealing physics code and back-end data from rFactor 2 without licensing, which too would be refuted in 2023.

All of this baggage, and Rennsport wasn't really even in the hands of consumers in any real capacity yet either. The amount of takers in those closed betas and the more recent free-to-play model felt slim with the title itself not bringing a lot to the table to give people a reason to jump ship. That F2P model which relied on microtransactions and the incorporation with ESL never struck a chord within realistic racing circles, and didn't make for a strong revenue stream. Things had to change, and a chance for some good graces in the public eye was made possible as a true video game release came in November which included a console release.

While the release of Project Motor Racing was spectacular for all the wrong reasons, the release of Rennsport simply came and went. It does have it's fair share of technical issues, which have been worked on at a pace with multiple patches being deployed in the month and a bit since release, but the whole of the game just feels uninspired. Commenters online calling it slop doesn't feel appropriate either, especially with that term deliberately being transformed to a synonym for generically bad after being used to purposefully discount and shame ai-generated pictures, videos, music, and writing. For what Rennsport is within the realistic racing space, seeing it more as the lowest common denomination feels more appropriate to what the game actually is. It's got all the classes of road racing cars one would expect from such a game, but without the real variety that exists in those classes outside of the forever soulless GT3. It has the real world tracks that always gets used for those respective cars, but with not a whole lot to actually do with any of it beyond the most simple of things you would expect from a esports focused realistic racing game. It barely has a single player in the modern sense; more aligning with how Formula 1 games used to be before Codemasters was given more flexibility with the license a decade ago. What does Rennsport bring to the table, beyond being a console option for those who want the most extreme of the realistic expression but without having to deal with Ian Bell?

For any new racing game in the realistic space to try and make a worthy foothold in the marketplace, it needs to bring something more now more than ever. Project Motor Racing tried with having an actual single player career mode and ticked all the nostalgia-bait boxes with it's car roster in the process, but was an absolute nightmare to attempt to play if you were fine with supporting two of the worst names within the genre. Rennsport doesn't have that kind of draw that allows it to stand on it's own as it tries to go up against the likes of iRacing and RaceRoom Racing Experience. In the most unflattering sense, Rennsport is just here and I don't know what it will take for it to be much more than that. What is the actual vision and use case for Rennsport?

In a rebuttal to an opinion piece on Overtake.gg which talked about how racing sims could make racing games obsolete and how silly I feel like that would be, one of the later segments talked about the ebb and flow of market demands and trends within the racing game genre. It highlighted how there was this overflow of new rally titles some years ago which saw the market get oversaturated, before the money in that market trend vanished and went elsewhere with subsequent new rally titles becoming sparse. That elsewhere would be in the more generic realistic racing space that Project Motor Racing, Rennsport, and future release Endurance Motorsport Series preside in. Watching the two November releases being busts for their own reasons makes wonder if we've hit that oversaturation point in this end of the marketplace, and I'm curious how KT Racing's future release is not going to be just another game filling up the field of entrants. It didn't help that PMR and Rennsport ended up being bad video games all round.

Rennsport feels like a field filler in that regard, but without being happy to be in the show at all. It's dry, with a lack of joie de vivre; and people in the racing game community saw that from a mile away. Much of it's controversial birth may be behind it, but what lays forward is whether or not it actually becomes a video game people would want to play in the first place.

Garnering a pulse would be a good place to start.