We reviewed Rennsport when it was still a closed beta and wrote about the state of the game in part 1 and part 2 articles. Needless to say, we're not a fan of the game, but it's got very little to do with the game itself.
The current state of the game
According to SteamDB, there's less than 100 players on average, per day, playing the game. If we had to add players for PlayStation and Xbox to the mix, it doesn't look much better. Le Mans Ultimate by comparison averages over 5000 players per day. Simply put, the game is not popular.
So, the question that results from this is: why?
Before we answer this, let's quickly list what the game has to offer. It costs $25 for the base version and $70 for the Deluxe Edition. If you splash out for the fancier version, you'll get 20 tracks and 30 cars. Tracks like the Nürburgring Nordschleife and Spa are in this list in all of their highly detailed glory. On the car side, you'll find a great big pile of the latest GT3s as well as the Porsche 963 hypercar and even some classics like the Mercedes-Benz CLK LM.
Crossplay is available across all platforms, so in theory, you should get the experience of playing a highly detailed sim against real players similar to iRacing or Le Mans Ultimate. So, what went wrong?
Controversies
We hated the idea that Rennsport initially chose to focus on eSports (ESL R1), where we could see drivers play the game live on Youtube but we couldn't. It made no sense to us that if a game was good enough to host a tournament with big prize money, then why wasn't it good enough for the public, albeit in a beta form?
Assetto Corsa Competizione did this, and it was amazing going along on the beta ride, experiencing the game slowly developing to what we still consider the best GT3 sim ever.
When we finally got our hands on a beta key and tried it for ourselves, we were maybe a bit glad that they kept it hidden for so long. The game at that stage felt like it had a very long way to go, and in some ways, not much has changed. It still feels unfinished and not even close to what we would expect from a sim that should be able to compete with LMU, never mind iRacing.
There was also the issue of Rennsport using code from ISI (rFactor 2), but that was a whole other problem that made the game seem very suspect.
Final thoughts
We still think that Rennsport is a good game in terms of handling physics and the tyre model. The cars and tracks are good, but it needs more content. However, the player base is so small that we doubt that anything the developers do from now on will make much of a difference.
Our opinion is that the developers' decision to isolate the community from the game while esports drivers get to play it was a very bad decision, and Rennsport will never recover from it. Let's hope we are wrong about this and maybe Rennsport will rise to challenge iRacing, LMU etc. Nothing wrong with having some more, good competition.
