I don’t have a witty or interesting way of introducing this submission, but we post pretty much everything that gets sent in using the Submit button, and today’s submission is no exception. RGL took time out of his day to send this in, so we’ll take the time to post and respond to it. That’s how we roll.
This is not really a submission, but more of a praise message I needed to send you. Let me start by telling you I’m one of the fucking imbeciles that fell victim to the PCARS hype train and bought in day one.
I don’t need to tell you how annoyed I am with SMS, not only for the disgraceful pre-release antics (lies about the state of the game, like the 99% done statement), but also for the censorship regime in the WMD place and later in the pCARS forum. I just want to say thank you for covering this. If only I had discovered your little website a couple of months sooner, I would have 60 euros more in my pocket. But that’s the past now, and I am happy to see someone has the balls to report on this.
That really shouldn’t be anything exceptional, every single journo/YouTuber/Average Joe with a blog remotely related to racing games should cover Ian’s meltdowns and the game’s current shitty state, but seeing the attitude of a lot of other sites, it seems you’re pretty much alone.
It’s nice to see what happens when there’s no money on the line and people can speak up their minds. I wanted to send you something, I’ve seen a lot of these videos you post to illustrate the state of the game. Let me show you one that will hopefully make your readers chuckle the next time you publish something about this trainwreck:
Let me end this with a petition. NEVER CHANGE. You’re doing a hell of a job. Soon you’ll have the chance to make money out of this, be it through ads or through access to early content as your place traffic increases and publishers send you stuff (or maybe not if they have something to hide LOL). Please, PLEASE, don’t let that change not even a little bit your degree of freedom to speak your mind.
Cheers, and thanks for what you do mate.
Covering Project CARS has been insane because it’s something myself and everyone else affiliated with PretendRaceCars.net were able to see coming years ago. Even from the very early builds, where half the tracks were unfinished, menus were placeholders, and interiors weren’t done, it was as if someone tried to put Shift 2 Unleashed and Race 07 in a blender, and kept only the bad parts. As I said in our Community Assisted Review, it didn’t look very good, didn’t drive very well, and the content selection kind of sucked. As far back as 2012 or 2013, it was very difficult to imagine what the game would look like in a completed state because even the basics weren’t being done right.
Admittedly I didn’t monitor development of the game very actively, trying it out for a couple of minutes every month or two, but my stance never changed on it. And once this site got started in early 2015 and we neared the game’s release, it was very apparent just from reading the WMD forums that development was going anything but smoothly. A lot of people like to say I’ve got a hate boner for the game, but in reality, it was strange reading all of these glowing previews of the title when playing it was an incredibly sub-par experience, and when the leaked version came out last summer, a large group backed up those sentiments. Said this numerous times, but I got NASCAR 2011 vibes. Hyped as the alleged savior as a genre, came out as a buggy mess, and then the developers freaked on the customers. Hated when that happened with a game I actually cared about, and didn’t want it to happen again even if it was for some shitty I wasn’t going to buy anyway. So I guess that drives us to report on pCars the way we do.
Why are we the only site reporting on it? I’m 22, independent, and can afford to be a shit disturber. Don’t got friends in the industry, don’t got connections, don’t got financial ties with a dev studio, don’t got overlords to appeal to or companies I’m required to remain on good terms with. Broke this down a while back, giving good reviews keeps a steady stream of free products rolling in so you’re guaranteed to have content to write about, and you can pocket the little revenue you do make from the site because you aren’t buying the games yourselves.
On the contrary, until recently, this was a free WordPress account. Dropping $110 allowed me to shorten the URL to just PretendRaceCars.net. I’ve got a life and a job outside of this site, so covering the cost was no biggie. And that approach lets us do whatever the hell we want. If you like it, cool. If not, there’s like ten other sites you can go to with much more politically correct content. Just prepare yourself for 50 of the same pCars Nurburgring videos, and be warned that you might not be able to speak your mind as often as you want.
PRC.net is a joint venture between a group of guys in the Sim Racing community that collectively have the worst reputation imaginable. Even if we were to kiss everyone ass, people would shit on us anyways, so why not just rule that approach out completely and tell it like it is? As the iRacing Street Stock article displayed a few weeks ago, even if we sit down as a group and write an article together genuinely discussing the positives and negatives of our experience in an online racing game, both from a technical standpoint and a fun standpoint, people will sit there and claim we’ve got some crazy vendetta and make up shit to discredit our genuine observations about technical aspects like the tire and aero physics.
I mean, I didn’t get to see the whole thread, but people were literally claiming our joint observations on the aero package were invalid because I called some chick a slut like three years ago. Kissing ass is not going to magically make these people stop shitting on you.
And unfortunately I have to spill the beans, we do in fact maintain an amicable relationship with a few different developers, and have what’s called press access to two different driving games. The fact that nobody has pointed out what these two titles might be, nor has anybody voiced complaints about favoritism for the two titles, indicates we’re not treating them any differently than titles we’ve have to pay for out of our own pocket. At some point I will create a dedicated biases page to help readers understand both myself and Chris D’s preferences when it comes to driving games, as well as disclose what games we’ve paid for, what we have press access to, and what we’ve torrented. Just a matter of setting it up in the correct format; it’ll probably replace the About page.
My abrasive personality isn’t going away anytime soon, and Chris has no plans to stop being an outspoken New Yorker, so don’t expect the site to change for quite some time. Maybe we’ll introduce some of our other pals to the site who are just as outspoken as we are in the future.
