Aren't you comparing apples and oranges. Fords are mass produced for
the general car buying public. Ferraris on the other hand are high end sport
cars designed/priced/ and aimed at a very small elite market.
GPL was created for the sim auto racing community. It was designed to be
the most realistic sim to date. However, Papyrus/Sierra were counting on a
selling enough units to at least pay for all the associated costs to produce
and market it. Unfortunately, the sales figures (approx. 45,000 units) were
no where near the required min number of sales. In other words they lost
their corp shirts. I'm quite sure that everyone who has anything to do with
producing a sim took notice of this.
GP3 is already a commercial success. They had advance orders of more
than 140,000 units, and sales that must be near 200,000+ already without the
even the North American market.
This does say quite a lot what the majority of the auto racing sim
market wants, and even more important, what they are willing to pay for. If
we could get a honest answer from Papyrus/Sierra, I'm sure that corporately
they would prefer to market a product like GP3 then suffer the financial
problems associated from GPL.
Just look at the ripple down effect. We didn't get Nascar 3 with the
GPL physics engine. They were hedging their bets. Making sure that the sim
would be playable both on most computers, and easy enough that it would be a
sales success. Now they are finally releasing Nascar 4 with the GPL engine.
On the other hand, any chance of getting a current Cart sim with the GPL
physcis engine was shelved.
Joel Willstein
> Your stistics are correct sir.
> I doubt however that Ferrari sell 1/1000 the number of cars that Ford do
> every year. What point are you trying to make?
> MS
> > Going on what I've seen mentioned within this char-grilled threads
> (that'll
> > be all the excessive flaming) - correct me if I'm wrong but...
> > GP3 pre orders are something like 150,000 copies.
> > GPL's total sales over a period of (what, 18 months or so) is about 1/4
of
> > that figure.
> > I'm not passing judgemnt - just a statement on the opinion of the masses
> > compared to that of RAS. Justification, if it were needed, for a little
> bit
> > of rationalisation.
> > Flame away - I really don't care!
> > Doug
