Sim modders plan to boycott Simraceway

by Bradley Wint on August 8th, 2009 at 4:00 am

With the recent announcement that rFactorCentral would be turning into Simraceway, a number of well-known community modders have gone up in arms and decided to boycott the new website’s concept. rFactorCentral, which was once community-driven on a totally free basis, is now being taken over by Ignite Skill Gaming. ISG has invested some dinero into Simraceway, offering a totally new concept along with a number of premium services.

Obviously this puts a spin on the picture because some of the essential services offered before may become monetized, so someone is gonna end up paying for the service, namely being the consumer. This makes the whole idea of community sharing a bit limited because potential racers may have to pay for the mods they once got for free. The whole usage of mods will turn into a quite a serious business with some stricter legal consequences.
This also puts a huge damper on modding because the whole purpose of the community was to share cars among one another for free in an effort to enjoy the game. Many members spend months and years working on projects for the love of it and not for the money. Now that a possible fee may be imposed to buyers, there may be less demand for the products and as a result, less of an incentive to create mods (even after the fact that they can earn money for their work). Also, what about the folks who can’t purchase mods online. There are a number of players below the age of 18 who obviously can’t buy stuff online since there are limited micro-payment methods available today.

So what are the implications for this? Who knows. The concept still has to be tested by the community before anyone can fully assess the success of it, but for now a lot of modding teams have joined the boycott train.

Via: VirtualR/RaceDepartment | Image: Simraceway

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