Custom Liveries

Personally I don't mind having a subscription based model for a game that is under continuous development and improvement, but I do mind monetizing the work of painters that create custom liveries. Hosting the content on their own servers isn't a justification to me because it isn't necessary, and means they are charging the players effectively a toll for distributing their own work, and profiting from it indirectly without compensating the creators. Peer to peer transfer could easily replace the need for Studio-397 servers hosting the livery content. And even allowing players to distribute their liveries manually, to whomever wants them would be preferable.

As I said, I don't mind the subscription model, but don't use other peoples work uncompensated to justify the subscription cost, its likely to foment ill will. Hosting the races and championships, and the development work is perfectly justifiable for charging a subscription. Having a second premium subscription that includes all the content, also seems completely justifiable and provides value. Charging for other peoples work uncompensated seems a step to far, and as the OP said, "is just wrong if you ask me."
 
Get back to rFactor2 and you will get exactly what you want, allowed client side skins, and it works (Not without issues by the way).

On rFactor2 and surely LMU skin is highly linked to the unique identifier of the player on track. There must be some sort of "central" base to store skin associations and manage that properly "world wide".

How do you manage properly Team skins ? Does the manager need to be on track to upload its skins for others ? Do all players on teams have to copy/paste their skins by themselves ? Manually ? Really, on 2026 ? :)

There is a lot going on you didn't take into account, imo.

There is always other way to do this and that. But which one is better ? I'm not sure we have enough data/context to respond to that here.
 
SaltyDog said:
And even allowing players to distribute their liveries manually, to whomever wants them would be preferable.
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This could still be done and was done for a while before the Livery Hub was created. Sites like Overtake.gg and LMUliveries.net hosted quite a lot of liveries in the early days many of which I downloaded, installed and also modified as it was easy to do in software like Gimp and saved starting from scratch. They're dead now of course, which is a shame, although the old Overtake.gg liveries are still available.
 
TonyRZ said:
Get back to rFactor2 and you will get exactly what you want, allowed client side skins, and it works (Not without issues by the way).

On rFactor2 and surely LMU skin is highly linked to the unique identifier of the player on track. There must be some sort of "central" base to store skin associations and manage that properly "world wide".

How do you manage properly Team skins ? Does the manager need to be on track to upload its skins for others ? Do all players on teams have to copy/paste their skins by themselves ? Manually ? Really, on 2026 ? :)

There is a lot going on you didn't take into account, imo.

There is always other way to do this and that. But which one is better ? I'm not sure we have enough data/context to respond to that here.
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At the risk of being simplistic, Trading Paints does this for iRacing completely outside of iRacing, and Music and Videos use to be distributed through Napster completely Peer to Peer from multiple users simultaneously. Any user providing the content could drop offline, and the download would continue and just pickup another user to source from. Wow that Napster reference really dates me doesn't it. Anyway, even the manual way you impugned would be better than locking it behind a pay wall.

Part of what has made sim racing interesting was the ability to share custom liveries and other custom content, and until now that has traditionally been free to do. Part of the reason it was free was because the work is all done by the community and it benefits the software developers by creating interest and longterm engagement. That last part, long term engagement, is what ultimately decides how long LMU survives and how profictable it is. I have a friend that litterally paints cars for iRacing more than he races, and distributes them free through Trading Paints. He doesn't do it for money and will not do commissioned work, he just likes historic liveries, and likes to see them on track. The primary reason he hasn't started racing LMU despite my attempts to get him to try it, is the custom livery paywall. Studio-397 has a perfectly valid and compelling reason to charge a subscription without the need to trap community created content behind their pay wall.

As for whats going on behind the seen that I am not considering; if I am oversimplifying, I think you may be over complicating, and as you said, "There is always other way to do this and that". I am reminded of the early days of iRacing when to participate in multi-car series you had to own every car in the series, even if you only intended to race one of them. Many of the iRacing defenders said it was just to complicated to make it so you didn't have to buy all the content before you could participate, and that went on for years. Suddenly, when the outcry became loud enough, and they wanted to introduce multi-class series's with many models, and it wasn't likely subscribers were going to buy 6 or 8 cars all at once, it miraculously became possible to just own 1 of the cars and still be able to participate.

Again, I don't mind the subscription model, just the indirect profiting from user created content e.g. liveries. What stops this same practice from being used to block other community content like custom telemetry apps, dashboards etc. from being locked behind the paywall next? What if it was Simhub or Crewchief that was being locked behind the wall? Setting a precedence can be a very slippery slope.
 
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Didn't know Napster or Trading were Peer to peer software and they had no server or any web infrastructure like servers or else, and were totally free.

Reminder, if it's free, it's not, you are the product, not the customer.
 
TonyRZ said:
Didn't know Napster or Trading were Peer to peer software and they had no server or any web infrastructure like servers or else, and were totally free.

Reminder, if it's free, it's not, you are the product, not the customer.
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Trading Paints is not Peer to Peer, Napster was. Trading Paints has a pro level that is a subscription that provides other resources so they do have a way to monetize, but they don't make the content they are getting free from the community what they are monetizing. With Napster, if I recall correctly, the only cost was that if you were going to use the app to download, you also had to contribute to uploading.
 
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TonyRZ said:
Reminder, if it's free, it's not, you are the product, not the customer.
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Thinking about this later, you are correct that when its free you are generally the product... looking at you Google, but in the case of custom liveries, you are the customer, creator and product. Just seems a little heavy handed to me.
 
I recognise it's only a part of the discussion, but it is worth noting that creators have the choice whether they make their work available to the public. When you upload a livery to the game, by default it is set to private, so only the owner is able to use it.
 
He pays to store it on a server, allow others to use it as a team or to public.

Question is not to pay or not.

It's rather if you accept to pay for the game service.

You don't want ? You can't ? Play another game.

As said previously, nothing is free.
I prefer to choose what i pay rather than not knowing what happens behind.

At this point subscribing to LMU is rather supporting the game, than actually paying for a full pro service.
 
TonyRZ said:
It's rather if you accept to pay for the game service.

You don't want ? You can't ? Play another game.
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Well that seems a rather calloused, and somewhat shortsighted approach to take to a customer base. I have never run a business where the attitude towards the customer is, if you don't like it move on. Certainly businesses can't change course drastically on the opinion of just one customer, but this is hardly an isolated concern. There are plenty of reasons to subscribe to LMU, and to support LMU without the need for such heavy handed tactics. As I mentioned before, the exchange of community developed liveries, apps, and content has long been part of what makes Sim racing interesting and engaging long term. This engagement is what helps keep customers buying DLC and paying for subscriptions.

Recognized or not, this content benefits LMU, and in my opinion the value the community content brings, the exposure and Free Marketing it creates, and the good will it develops in the community, are far more valuable long term than the handful of people that might be influenced to subscribe to Race Control by monetizing the work of others. I doubt many are subscribing to Race Control because of the liveries feature, but I do know of some that aren't subscribing because of it.

We can of course disagree on this as we obviously do, and the developers are free to choose whether to stay on this path or not. How long LMU remains viable will tell if they got the mix of features vs paywalled features right. It's not a matter of '....You can't ? Play another game', I obviously can, it's more a matter of how many won't, and take your advice to 'play another game'.
 
the exchange of community developed liveries, apps, and content has long been part of what makes Sim racing interesting and engaging long term
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Lets be honest, A lot of that died a while ago, Just look at the way setups have gone, Everybody wants money for everything now, You could once go to YouTube for a free setup, They now all link you to a setup site so you can give them 5 quid for it, Take Jardier, Made a big deal about starting a setup section for ACC on his site, Lasted 5 minutes and then stopped bothering, Now he's in bed with Coach Dave and he's alright Jack, The community can do one and use his Coach Dave affiliate link if you want his setup.

It may have been like that when Sim Racing was niche, When we were all nerds back in the day with our steering wheels bolted to our table or desk, Happy for someone to tell you that your setup is great, Or that livery is the nutts, Now it's big business, Everyone wants a bit.

I know that apps and liveries are holding out and have nothing but gratitude for the people that develop them and give them away, Which makes putting the use liveries behind a paywall even worse, They could even say if you have all the DLC you can have liveries as a thank you.

And I'll tell you what's giving to the Sim Racing community, On October 18th 2017 I sent Wotever £3 for a license for his little known utility called SimHub, Here I am near on 10 years later still getting weekly updates, And S397 can't even stretch to free liveries.
 
Babylon said:
Lets be honest, A lot of that died a while ago, Just look at the way setups have gone, Everybody wants money for everything now
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Babylon said:
I know that apps and liveries are holding out and have nothing but gratitude for the people that develop them and give them away, Which makes putting the use liveries behind a paywall even worse
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It's definitely true that as sim racing has become more mainstream, there are more people trying to find a way to get a piece of the pie, and the camaraderie that used to be such a big part of the community has changed. But I really don't have an issue with people deciding they would like to be compensated for the hard work they do. Whether it's for apps or the artwork that goes into liveries, I am personally OK with creators wanting to be compensated for their efforts.

You mentioned SimHub, which is an excellent example of true dedication to the sim racing community. The developer asks to be compensated but does it in a way that respects the history and tradition of the hobby. Wotever could have easily taken the same heavy-handed approach toward monetization as Studio-397 is taking with livery distribution; by selling the app and then charging a recurring subscription just to access the telemetry data output by each of the sims it supports. If that happened, SimHub would be charging users to pass through data created by the game developers, and the community and studios would likely not be too happy about it, and rightfully so.

The problem with the livery hub in my view is exactly that: it is monetizing the work of others rather than their own. By creating an artificial gate for distribution and making it the ONLY permitted method, it essentially becomes a corporate toll booth for people who already own the game to access something the creator was perfectly happy to share with the community for free.
 
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