Hi guys.
I hope you and your families are all staying safe.
It's not that we don't want to promote these events; they get a huge amount of publicity already, the kind RaceDepartment has dreamt of for years.
The truth is we're working on what our strategy should be with events like these at the moment. We are in agreement with you that the world is in a dark place right now and these playful events are a nice distraction from the daily grind. Having said that, we offered to help out in any capacity we could but didn't get a response. I'm not sure if these organisers see us as a threat. They shouldn't. RaceDepartment wants to focus on bringing the community together.
Before the global pandemic hit, we were at the start of making some changes to improve the platform for everyone. Please don't think that we're being spiteful not covering this stuff; we're just overwhelmed trying to do our own thing and slowly implementing those previously mentioned changes. Unlike the new emerging platforms, we don't have a piggy bank to smash for the millions of dollar it takes to launch large scale events. Our small team is putting in a ton of hours on behind the scenes stuff we can't share yet, hoping to bring forward something you, the most passionate community of simracers in the world, will enjoy!
All I ask is to bear with us.
Jenn Cutter
Creative Director, RaceDepartment
Thanks for taking the time to respond but I can't help feeling that this sidesteps the main issue.
Editorially, RD is still very active in publishing front page stories about - to be brutal - not very much at all. This race cancelled, that race cancelled. Small patch for this sim, some news about another one. And it's mostly second hand news, swept up from other websites and published long after it was breaking news elsehwere.
Surely the people with responsibility for writing this stuff would welcome the opportunity to write about these amazing events that are growing in stature, reputation and quality by the week? Are your editorial staff choosing not to write about these events, feature these events? Or are they prevented from doing so by some kind of policy?
RD's editorial has been justifiably criticised in the past for over-reporting on F1 and flooding the front page with stories about it, reports written by writers who only saw it on TV, same as the rest of us. Those events are not happening now, but something else has emerged in its place. That, in my opinion, is more relevant to RD's purpose than actual racing. Yet it's being completely ignored and, if anything, hidden, on this site.
Your technical staff may be busy working on new platforms, and that's great, but I'm not sure they're even intended to compete with what's happening elsewhere.
It was kind of RD to offer help to these series, and sad that no reply was received. But why should that stop RD helping? If threads were created promoting and reporting on races, pinned to the front page and encouraging comments, then maybe more RD readers would become aware of them, watch them, and discuss them here.
RD could contribute, albeit in a small way, to the wellbeing of its readers in making them aware of what's there to entertain them and giving them a central platform to discuss it. It could contribute to the emergence of these new events and their popularity and, hey, maybe even make their editorial staff more happy by giving them the opportunity to write about the stuff.
And it wouldn't cost millions of dollars.