Will WEC Receive Their Promised Sim Racing Game?

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What's next for WEC?

  • A dedicated game

    Votes: 392 44.2%

  • rFactor 2

    Votes: 318 35.9%

  • Nothing

    Votes: 177 20.0%
  • Total voters
    887
With the 6h of Monza coming up this weekend and their classes LMH and LMDh shaping up nicely soon, one can't help but hope for some digital representation for this endurance racing series. However, with the way the WEC license holder, Motorsport Games, has been going lately, seeing the software come to fruition is uncertain.

The Motorsport Games Story so Far​

It all started with the acquisition spree of Motorsport Games in 2021. Acquiring licenses left and right and even right out buying Studio 397, the rFactor 2 developers, Motorsport Games seemed like an upcoming powerhouse in digital racing. One of the licenses involved was the right to give FIA's WEC or World Endurance Championship a digital representation.

However, things didn't work as planned. Their first big release, NASCAR 21: Ignition seemed to be not much more than a haphazardly rushed title. Reports from within the company later confirmed that. But everyone could see it. Game-breaking bugs were only the tip of the iceberg and the game became a critical failure.

This whole scenario sent Motorsport Games' stock tumbling down. Even worse so when they announced in March 2022 that their existing cash in hand couldn't even support them for “at least the next 12 months.” Further delays to the well-hoped for BTCC title and subsequent release of BTCC content via rFactor 2 left more questions than answers. All the while Motorsport Games stock dropped below 1$ per share meaning they could be kicked off the stock market if things don't improve until December.

And just for your knowledge, being delisted from the stock exchange could mean complete de-validation of the stocks meaning financial trouble.

What This Could Mean For All The Licenses​

The licenses held by motorsport games are some grand ones with many hopes of them coming to fruition. IndyCar, NASCAR, BTCC and WEC are the biggest ones. While Motorsport Games owns all of these licenses, they might not be able to create dedicated games for all of them.

As we have already seen with BTCC and IndyCar content, the existing rFactor 2 platform could become a host of some of these titles. This, however, is all subject to the terms and conditions of the licensing contracts. What we can expect is that several licenses might, for short-term financial gain, be published via rFactor 2. All of which boost the rF2 community and roster strength.

This however doesn't mean that dedicated titles are not on the horizon.

What Could Happen to WEC​

While everything is in a state of turmoil, the WEC license is the one we know the least about. IndyCar and BTCC have received their rFactor 2 content and you know NASCAR is going to continue one way or the other.

WEC so far has received little care. That could mean 1 of 2 things.
  1. A WEC game is deep in development and on the horizon.
  2. A WEC game is not at all in development and will be the odd one out of Motorsport Games roster.
Now as much as I personally hope for 1. to be true, I can't help but have that little devil on my shoulder telling me about 2. But I don't know what will happen.

What do you think lies in store for the WEC license? Are we going to see a WEC title? Or is rFactor 2 going to feature WEC? Or have they just completely forgotten about it? Let us know in the comments below!
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About author
Julian Strasser
Julian Strasser
Motorsports and Maker-stuff enthusiast. Part time jack-of-all-trades. Owner of tracc.eu, a sim racing-related service provider and its racing community.

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Comments

AlleyViper
pcraenme said:
oversaturated graphics of AMS2 or ACC
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A small heads up that on ACC using the (old) UE Default or later ACES tone mapper will make a big difference, so as playing with exposure/saturation/contrast or wb to your taste. Options are still there to tweak if you don't like defaults.
 
chargenick1563
Man, all this arguing and bashing on RF2 because of graphics just has me rolling my eyes. Who cares about graphics? If the game drives good and does a lot of things right and gets a lot of the details right then why do graphics even matter? I haven't played RF2 myself but I've heard plenty of good things about it and everything I've ever seen from it shows it has solid graphics anyway. I can't say it looks too different from any other game that came out around the same time period either. RF2 came out in 2012, AKA back when the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 were still the active console generation and Nvidia was just coming out with the GTX 600 series. You really expect it to look like games from the late 2010s and 2020s? So sure it's not the graphics fidelity of modern games and some others in the genre, but again that goes back to my point of who cares?

I can't say I ever see anyone bashing GTR2 for the same reason. Why? Because the game drives great and does a fantastic job at simulating 90s-00s sports car racing. The game looks like it is, a game from the mid-2000s. And yet it's a legendary game and you never see anyone bash its graphics. Why can't that same logic be applied to any other game. There's a reason I and many others still play and love games like GTR2 and NR2003 today, because the games are the best at what they intended to do and that was simulate racing. It doesn't matter that at first glance you can easily guess their release era, because they are still the best at what any racing simulator is trying to do.

Anyway, I figure I should get on the topic of the conversation since that first topic shouldn't have even happened in the first place. Maybe Motorsport Games will survive long enough to release their WEC game, maybe not. Maybe WEC will pull their license, maybe not. I think at this point it's hard to have faith WEC will get their own game and even harder to have faith they'll get a good game. It's certainly a series that deserves to be simulated and plenty are clamoring for it, especially as we enter the LMDh era. But at this point cutting their losses and just sticking to having their own expansion within RF2 and any other existing game is the way to go for now, because my faith in Motorsport Games is below the basement at this point.
 
P
tr1v1um said:
It's funny to read all the complaints about rF2 being crap and ugly, while it's the only modern sim that you can use for multiclass endurance racing with all bells and whistles, out of the box without having to wade through forums and install 3rd party stuff with full time TOD cycle, dynamic weather, driver swaps, online and offline. And when you use the actual high quality content it holds pretty damn well along the current crop of sims. And for all the issues that the software has no sh*t talking about it will change the fact that it simply does alot of stuff that other products simply don't offer at all.

Maybe AC2 will change that, but there is still a bit of time until we really see if it is as good as we all expect. Until then, the easiest way to create an official WEC game for MG would be going the same way as Kartsim and create a standalone product using rF2 as a platform. And I won't lie, I would buy such a product if the price is right and if it offers the full package - aka not the insane Kartsim pricing. Production costs for such a product should be reasonable aswell as alot of the content is allready available.
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Totally agree with you on all this. Even with the current rF2 UI, they could easily use the built-in Series functionality and create a WEC Series, only showing WEC content (cars & tracks) in the Car & Track selection screens.
 
sc4dr
Motorsport Games really laid an egg. Such buffoonery on their part trying to corner the market with obvious shortcomings. I forecast icy weather for this Titanic voyage.
 
D
Until MSG misses some previously agreed upon date or the inability to create a specific feature desired by WEC, then WEC is bound by the agreements that have been signed. They can't just go: 'Oh this looks bad, give us our properties back.' Well, they can ask nicely, but they have no leverage until something in the contract is breached.
 
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FernandoAFM
VFX Pro said:
WEC should get off their ass and license those cars for a very low fee to iRacing and AMS2, rfactor 2 and call it a day.
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This. All major championships (NASCAR, F1, IndyCar, WRC, WEC) should allow multiple developers to have a go at the license. It’s a bit silly we have to buy from developer x or z just because they hold exclusive rights. I know it all comes back to money, but wouldn’t it be great if we had a choice between buying the sim or the arcade for each series? Wasn’t f1 like this in the 90s?
 
R.Man
pcraenme said:
Each time I startup rF2 after having played AMS2 or ACC, I notice how natural rF2 graphics and colors look compared to the oversaturated graphics of AMS2 or ACC. I think referring to rF2 having old graphics is really old news. rF2 graphics have improved a lot over the years and are more than good enough (for me). They only finally need to iron out some old bugs (some of these they fixed in recent updates) and make multi-class AI work better.
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I've just started to play the old race 07 sim. My first impression is that the graphic is on par with the actual RF2 in triple screen and even better than sim like RRRE its grand son. The only noticeable difference is that RF2 tracks and cars have more detailed PBR textures with higher resolution. I agree for AMS2 graphic not being natural, its closer to titles like NSF or Forza Horizon and logically PC2. But if we don't count AC with CSP , ACC has the most natural and realistic lighting outta here but only IF you know how to tweak it in game ( setting post processing, saturation, brightnes and contrast,etc) I dind't like ACC graphic too at the beginning but learned how to adjust it over the time. It's easy to find RF2 natural when the reference you take is AMS2 or ACC (default)
 
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Botmeister
A positive side note. These WEC/RF2 topics are pretty popular all over the interwebs. As soon as MSG no longer has the licenses, I hope other developers are eagerly waiting to take over. With esports growing there should be a viable and honest (!) business model here.
 
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R.Man
chargenick1563 said:
Man, all this arguing and bashing on RF2 because of graphics just has me rolling my eyes. Who cares about graphics

I can't say I ever see anyone bashing GTR2 for the same reason. Why? Because the game drives great and does a fantastic job at simulating 90s-00s sports car racing.
Click to expand...
Who cares? If we just use statistic as basis , lot of people in this thread alone care about it. Also may be not for you but for many other people graphic quality have effect on how long they can play a sim. Graphic has psychological effect on players motivation. That's why even the dumbest game studios know that graphic is a powerful selling argument.
An another very simple statistic based argument. If we look at the sim racing community online, Youtube has more videos about sim graphic mod or vanilla than about sim driving (reshade, realistic POV, Sol, Pure, etc). Those videos have the most views also.
People are not bashing GTR2 graphic because it's an old game and no longer officially maintained.
 
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Jach
BrettSinclair1 said:
However, AC is unfortunately a lackluster racing sim. There are tons of quality cars and tracks, but I cannot ever see a WEC race working properly in AC (singleplayer, that is).
Hopefully AC2 will turn out to be more than a driving sim, and combine the best of AC and ACC.

EDIT: You laugh? Enjoy "simulating" your WEC races with standing starts!
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Exactly what I wanted to say. AC is more of a driving sim than racing sim
 
R
Ridiculous that there is not a game at least in development, the sponsors and makes would be all over it, it is easily possible now to do this, even with just two or three classes
 
BrunoDSL
FernandoAFM said:
This. All major championships (NASCAR, F1, IndyCar, WRC, WEC) should allow multiple developers to have a go at the license. It’s a bit silly we have to buy from developer x or z just because they hold exclusive rights. I know it all comes back to money, but wouldn’t it be great if we had a choice between buying the sim or the arcade for each series? Wasn’t f1 like this in the 90s?
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If you didn't have exclusivity deals, no developer would buy the license and no games would be developed as a result of that.
 
V
Premium
MadDriver11 said:
Wouldn't call this realistic graphics. Feels like a cartoon...

Even with that there is more to graphics than the visual quality of the track. Wet tracks in RF2 are nowhere close to the visual and even racing quality of ACC and AMS2 just to make a couple of examples.
The MP experience in terms of stability for RF2 is only better than AMS2 which is yet to have any attention from its developer: ACC (and likely AC2 when it comes) and iracing are far more stable. The virtual Le Mans 24 hours events on RF2 were plagued by so many server restarts. Some events in the last Virtual WEC season were canceled as they couldn't even connect all the players to the server.
MSG and S397 are trying to revive RF2 from deads on the basis of the assumed best physics but other sims similarly wide content are catching up if not overtaking (AMS2) and other more focused sims like ACC have found far more popularity. I don't think RF2 can be revived: they would have to build RF3 from ground zero up, but they have no money so they keep doing CPR to something that is now too old to get any traction with users.
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That track is a mod, made as a conversion from a F1 2013's track. You can't use it as an example.
 
V
Premium
Mario2010 said:
In my opinion, there will be a separate game under the license of the FIA WEC. Gerard Neveu himself said that for the 100th anniversary of Le Mans there will be a dedicated game about this race, so why would he tell the truth?
Until the game's release, ACO's virtual racing will use rFactor 2.
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The Virtual LM will never use the dedicated WEC game.
The dedicated series' games which MSG has programmed are not supposed to be sims, they are supposed to be broad-reaching games in line with the F1 games, appealing to a wider audience than simracers, who are a very very small part of the gaming public and NOT where the big $$$ can be made.
Now, will they actually manage to publish those games? I don't know, so it's a matter of all of us waiting.
In the meantime, rFactor 2's Oreca LMP2 and the GTE cars received revised tyres, revised aero/mechanical grip balance, physics tweaks, which addressed the issues which the previous versions exhibited.
 
kondor999
The CEO has a really sketchy past. The entire enterprise looks like an exit scam, where the executives pay themselves big salaries until it all falls apart, then they declare bankruptcy and start over in some other field a few years later (if that).

I actually know someone who did this for a "living". He just started companies, got funding (often taxpayer-funded startup programs), paid himself a big salary, then let the business "fail". He would then wait a while and do it again. Eventually he moved into real estate (with his ill-gotten gains as his seed money for his first house) and seems to make an honest living at this point.
 
drift92
I don't want to deal with that *steam items* any more.
So... maybe new stuff. idk
 

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