NEW GAME OR OLD GAME? WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Subscribers will get the best deal of anybody on the new game, as I've said in the blogs. I will be explaining this in detail with a new blog. In fact, we're going to make it worthwhile to keep the subscription active, and it will be a much better arrangement then anybody else will get, out of respect for the support you have given us, allowing us to keep going.


For the record, that's absolutely not our intention, and I don't believe it is that way. They mainly do the same thing as the old game. You could heal a driver with reward points, or repair a car with reward points, you could reset a team and get $50m from nowhere. In the new game you can repair the car with tokens, heal a driver with tokens, or add some balance with tokens. They are not integral as much as they are integrated, in the way Reward Points never were, hidden and obscure, but offering the same powers for the most part. The subscription model is dated and doesn't appeal to many people, and subscription games are dying off in a very democratic way, as people like being able to play games for free and choose how much they invest. We've made sure the purchases are aimed at accelerating things, not handing over a direct advantage. There is no advantage from buying tokens that you can't also earn from grinding and leveling up for free.

Free-to-play was always the core philosophy of iGP, we're just making it far easier to maintain with one central service for everyone. That means we'll be able to develop the game more. With the free/subscriber model, we were slowed down massively by maintaining two games and balancing things all the time, not to mention Java and other obstacles. On top of that, subscribers always complained that too much was available for free and f2p users always complained that subscribers had a "pay to win" advantage (yes, many more people said the old game was pay to win, believe it or not).


In some capacity I've wanted to do that from the start, and I expected these reactions from some people. Mainly, I expected certain groups of hardcore simracers to feel alienated by the changes, but for the most part not that much disruption. However, releasing a legacy game won't be possible initially, it's something we can look in to at a later date. Runescape did something similar, launching their new game then offering "Runescape classic" alongside it at a later date.

Actually, you will get significantly more value in the new game than you would have by saving your £20 and spending it on tokens when it is released. I will detail how in my upcoming blog for subscribers specifically. As I mentioned at the start, subscribers will get the best deal by far, and we intend to make it generous enough that you want to stay subscribed when the new game arrives.

At least until we redevelop that part in WebGL. As I explained in another thread we weren't able to because we don't actually have the source code for it, it was an outsourced job and the studio who did it literally lost the source code. We need to decompile and reverse engineer before it can be converted to WebGL.

That's correct Robert. The livery builder is the only thing which uses a plugin now and when it is converted no plugins will be required at all in any area of the game. We've already rebuilt all java and flash applets, most importantly the race viewer.

Glad to hear it. A lot of work went in to rebalancing the tyres and strategies to make races more interesting, and we can still do more.

What you describe in your experience of the old version sounds like one thing we're improving with the update. It got tedious after a while adjusting spinners every day, and the challenge gradually dissolved in to routine, and then a chore. This will not happen in the new game, and at all levels the challenge will stay fresh.

Not all of the pieces are in place for that yet, but we've made a massive first step in the right direction to replace the dragged out routine aspects with more satisfying gameplay. More will be done as the new game is developed. I've said it before, but this is not an endpoint, it's a new platform and a new beginning.