it lacks visual wear and apart from the dynamic handling the game is an updated

@TheRagebeardI just thought blue looked better😂

Then Mario pulled out his bespoke colour… damn him 

@TigerAlen410 Well as @ScarDuck14 alluded to when sales drop EA is more likely to cancel the series then do a major overhaul to revive it.

Also casual players make up most of the sales for any given game. They aren't going to be miffed that they're wheel doesn't work because they're playing on a pad. They're not going to be upset that ranked is all out of whack because they're playing career. They won't notice the bugs etc.

I mean F1 23 still has an average review of "Very Positive" on steam which is largely due to the casual playerbase.

@TheRagebeardI complain and complain about issues but I also appreciate I’m in the minority who need to play the game every which way for up to and over 900hours(F1 21) So I will find all the issues that the game has that a casual player playing no more than 50hours will never notice

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@TheRagebeard wrote:

Also casual players make up most of the sales for any given game. They aren't going to be miffed that they're wheel doesn't work because they're playing on a pad. They're not going to be upset that ranked is all out of whack because they're playing career. They won't notice the bugs etc.

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That's an important point to bear in mind, we're 30-40 people how really loves these games and the sport, margin won't ever comes from us but from the casuals and they just want to play some 30-40 minutes and move on to another stuff.

Is that an excuse to release the game as it has been released since 2021? Not at all but shed some light as where the priorities are in an yearly installment with a tight pipeline of work.

@ScarDuck14 @dancrodrigues 

To clarify, I agree with you, but it’s one of those 80/20 rule things. Casuals make up 80% of sales but 20% of playtime while hardcore players makeup  the opposite.

which on the surface would lead one to believe EA should prioritize hardcore players since they’ll log the most hours, but as we know EA is a corporation so they’ll prioritize sales by getting casuals in the door and then overloading them with micro-transactions.

But @Jey85 has best F1 sig… Just thought I’d add that 😁

As far as I know, based on the last Codemasters Annual Shareholders Reports prior to the bidding jostle between Take-Two and EA for Codies acquisition, EA's letter of intent and cash offer to the FCC and stock markets, and EA's Annual Reports since the deal went through:

• It's been a goal for a long time on Codies' side to monetize the franchise, increasing their revenue from player engagement throughout the lifespan of any and all F1 titles instead of just gross sales revenue 
• EA won their bid for the company both for the large lump of cash and for their expertise in live services operations and game analytics, among other reasons
• EA is concerned about the disappointing revenue in F1's monetization 

Seems clear enough to me that their goal is to profit on player engagement. One of the main reasons it's so off-putting to see the community hostile against EA for F1 World and other FOMO shenanigans stems from that first point, by the way: those were in Codemasters' cards way, way back EA had anything to do with the franchise, but that's a tangent.

Anyway, their target audience is players who engage with these games very much like a live service. Season passes, time-limited events, microtransactions and the like. And their goal is to grow that user group and drive engagement up. Sales figures are less of a concern; active players or recurring players are more of a pressing metric*.

I have no idea what you guys would call that sort of player. One that logs hour of play time week in and week out. Does it matter if they're on a pad or on a wheel to determine if they're a "hardcore" or a "casual"? I think that duality, at least in this framing, is not on par with how the games industry think their business anymore.

Edit: *just to make sure, no company is ever going to snub and scoff at sales figures. Just wanted to emphasize that those (player engagement and monetization) seem to be their focus under the current model.

Loyal F1 players that come back year after year and have enough of a disposable income to bite these games out of shelf under full MSRP are always on their sights. But there's a reason single player modes have been neglected so much in the past years, and the "all new" career seems to be such a lackluster facelift.

@mariohomoh I think that's a fair point regarding player engagement driving profit. The snag they hit is that unlike say FIF... EAFC, EA's monetization strategy doesn't resonate with either casual/hardcore players here because no one really wants a virtual couch. I think they were hoping that F1 World would solve that problem by being the equivalent of FUT to drive MTX but F1 World ended up resonating with the casual fans who don't play for as long or spend as much money.

The "hardcore" fans mostly brushed F1 world aside because all they want is a close to true to life sim as possible. They don't want to be disassembling their rare Guenther Steiner to replace him with a Legendary Mike Krack.