Re: We're not stupid
@Nellix82 Hey Nellix, just wanted to shoot some numbers here.
Kunos is not a publicly traded company per se but it is owned by Digital Bros Digital Entertainment. You can find their financial reports here.
From their latest quarterly report for the fiscal year 23/24:
So the whole Assetto Corsa franchise (AC + ACC) made € 5.3m in that quarter. Is it safe to assume that it totals around 20-21m per year? Well, I guess it does. From their consolidated financial statements for 2023:
The revenue of Premium Games as of June 30th, 2023, amounts to Euro 92,319 thousand [...] with remarkable Euro 24.6 million sales coming from the different versions of the video game Assetto Corsa, created by the in-house studio Kunos Simulazioni
There's also some neat numbers for their player base distribution between console and PC as well if you dig around. In a nutshell, console grew up significantly.
Now, F1. Hard to gauge as EA bunches up all their sports franchises. And their quarterly revenue are in the billions. You can find it all here. But I've got this old Codemasters' financial report from before the acquisition by EA and it is fortunately still available online here. There are several things in that report that... well, one could say that aged like milk, but here's what it says about F1 2019's performance:
So in 2020, Codemasters had a revenue of £76 million (€89.8 million) driven mostly by F1 2019 + GRID, while in 2019 they accrued £71.2 million between F1 2018 + DiRT 2.0 + ONRUSH (€84.1 million). I guess it is safe to assume that F1 was the one doing the heavy lifting?
That's a bit higher. Even if it accounted for only half of 2019-2020's revenue, F1 games would have netted Codies about 45 million euros vs the 21-24m that AC + ACC made for Kunos. Adjust those 2020 figures against inflation and.. heh.
What about moderns games? Hard to say, there are some estimates online specially around Steam numbers, but they do not seem reliable enough. F1 very often makes it to the top of UK's and Europe's sales charts though. And there's no way to glimpse into the microtransactions revenue.
Edit: Nellix if you're on PC and miss having fun online, you should really look into iRacing. They're going heavy in open-wheel/formula racing this upcoming season (March). Their league system is top tier, plus their obvious online features and open lobbies.
The Super Formula car is crazy fun.