Is BeamNG. Drive losing Popularity?

that's just even more illegal

 

The lower the average age in these forums get, the less I want to be on here.

 

I cared about sounds when I was considering the game in 2015, but I ended up buying it because of how there were so many other good things.

 

I'd say it's alive and well. Still has solid growth in player count.


Source: https://steamdb.info/app/284160/graphs/

 

hasnt for me...

 

He probably meant when BeamNG was only a project and was never intended to be developed this far.

 

are you kidding me? tdev always intended to make money off of this and develop it, he only started it after he failed to do that with RoR

 

We could increase popularity if we tried spreading the word about this game on other simracing forums (NoGrip, RaceDepartment, etc) and add a proper racing mode.

 

Not worried a bit. A million scenarios could play out with this game and it's underlying technology, "dying off" isn't one of them. That's silly talk.

 

BeamNG, you're nothing to me now. You're not a triple-A title, you're not a casual play. I don't want to know you or what your developers do. I don't want to see you on Steam sales, I don't want you near my hard drive. When you are finally updated, I want to know a day in advance, so I won't be forced to queue your download. You understand?

Just kidding, I'm really looking forward to the West Coast USA map, though

 

I agree! You can say BeamNG is dying all you want, but then again, we're all dying. The only way we'll really know is when we suddenly find ourselves on that hospital bed.

I also disagree with the sentiment about the community being toxic. Maybe it is elsewhere, but on the forums, BeamNG is remarkably one of the friendliest gaming communities I've experienced in 2017.

This is something I've wanted to say for a few weeks now actually. Many other moderated forums result in bottled anger and passive aggressive posts, and that's something I don't feel here. Maybe I'm not one to talk because I'm a misanthrope, because I don't believe in false friendliness, and because I'm generally not as tolerant as I'd like to be. I simply feel so much better about this community than others. Thank you for sharing your enthusiasm with me here!

 

not ded, just resting

 

It's kinda natural. As with everything, novelty wears off after a while.

People looking for a peculiar driving sim... I can see them getting bored after a while, the game is still largely unfinished and severely lacking in this sense.

For those who can see the massive potential offered by the game's sandbox nature, though, interest may never wane.

 

If BeamNG is dying, you can probably blame bad education and/or parenting for giving kids short attention spans and dulling their creativity. Other people have noted that in its current unfinished, content-poor state, BeamNG very much is a "make your own fun" type of game, and whether that means modding or just finding things to do with the existing content, it takes a certain kind of person to do it. The way I was raised... I was homeschooled, and my parents made sure I got some non-electronic entertainment as well, both indoors and outdoors, so I got well used to making my own fun, whether it was racing Hot Wheels cars around a course laid out in Lincoln Logs or just stomping around the woods with the neighbor kid making our own scenarios up as we went. I would do much the same thing in video games - back when Porsche Unleashed still worked for me, I could kill hours just driving around the city section of Auvergne in the many different mod cars I'd installed. Still today, some of my favorite games are the ones that are the best for just picking up and hotlapping.

A lot of other people, I guess, aren't quite like that. They want their fun made for them. They want hundreds of cars and tracks premade, and they don't understand how the same soft-body physics that caught their eye in the first place make those things difficult. They want fully-finished campaigns with hundreds of races and missions. They want massive customization on a per-car basis. While there's nothing wrong with those things per se, the fact is that a lot of people can't get along without those things because, for whatever reason, they lack the ability or simply the will to find their own fun within a true sandbox game. On top of that, many racing game players are casuals and dabblers who play many different types of games and may not be gearheads in real life, and thin content combined with brutal sim physics is not going to hold these people's attention for very long. That stuff is going to attract people whose affection for racing games is a part of their affection for cars and driving in general - people like me, in other words. Too bad my computer is old and useless and I'm too lazy to get a better job. Also too bad there are so few of those people anymore.

The way the car list is composed is another thing. None of them are licensed. If you're generous with the definition of "supercar", you might be able to call four of them supercars, and all have significantly-less-super variants included. Maybe two of them are JDM. One is a dockyard trike, one is a semi-tractor, and many of the others are the automotive equivalent of appliances. Mature drivers know that a car is only boring if you let it be (I've managed to extract enjoyment from my mother's Dodge Journey, and I wasn't even really thrashing it), but as I said before, a lot of potential players are casuals looking for their next drift lobby or LaFerrari thrill ride, and a bunch of FWD sedans aren't going to appeal to those people.

One thing I'm often reminded of, when I get on this subject, is my father playing Need for Speed High Stakes. My parents got me that game when I was about 5 years old, and sometimes my father would play it too. About the only thing I can remember from that is his driving a white Pontiac Firebird in Getaway events on Hometown. While I never thought to ask at the time, and it's about 11 years too late to ask now, I bet I know why he picked that combination of car and track: because out of all the possible combinations, it would have been one of the most familiar to him, as he was a pure product of America so far as I can remember. Contrast that to the "core demographic" of a typical AAA racing game today. They're interested in only a few basic types of cars:

-The latest super & hypercars
-Classics
-Joke cars
-Anything JDM

Remember what I said before; I like racing games because I like cars and driving anyway. I try to drive skillfully and incorporate real-life influences even in incredibly arcadey games, and for this reason I like having a good selection of cars that are at least somewhat attainable in my own country. So many of the cars present in modern AAA titles are just plain not relatable either because I would never bother with them in real life, because they're some other country's version, or just because they're so frickin' expensive that I wouldn't consider them worth it unless I literally had Bill Gates's money. I guess for a lot of people, that's exactly what they're looking for, but my fantasies are a lot closer to earth.

On top of all that, I fear YouTube is not showing the game's full potential. Endless crash videos set to generic (and usually terrible) electronic music start to look the same after a while, and fads such as spike strips, chained cars, and so on do little to keep it fresh - especially since the good ones like the explosive propane tank seem to fall by the wayside. Meanwhile, non-crash-related content is comparatively rare, and serious time attack videos that show off the game's impressive driving physics seem to be the rarest of all. It's not hard to see why this happens - crashing takes less skill than driving, and watching realistic damage in action is addictive somehow, which makes BNGD a gold mine for YouTubes looking to spam repetitive (and not always good - I can't be the only one who has their buzz killed when they see smoke pouring out of a car's tailpipe from the very beginning of a clip - especially since that's usually a result of trying to get a massive run-up and I honestly think low-speed crashes look better than high-speed ones - same goes for hilariously farfetched scenarios in a video titled "realistic crashes") crash videos - but in the end, that combined with the lack of content gets BeamNG pigeonholed as a novelty crash simulator when it's so much more.

 

When I first saw this game, thanks to the bad graphical quality and (boring) gameplay, I don't really think this game will amazes me.
But when I got the game, suddenly, I fell in love with it. The cars aren't enough, the tracks too, but the gameplay is virtually unlimited.
Who cares, I did a blog on CT about why smaller game titles beating most bigger ones. I never regretted buying this ever.

Spoiler: Dat blog here

https://www.carthrottle.com/post/wq434r3/

PS: I rather see a supercar over a minivan in this game, just because...IDK. XD

 

Maybe.

 

I can definitely relate to the later part of your book. Content on YouTube is bland and always the same. Sure a crash compilation isn't bad and all especially from decent people who know how to make em propperly. But take me as an example. I made 9 episodes of abandoned cars. The goal with it to make a small series to compete with the crash compilations.

Did I achieve what I wanted? Well my best video got just about 38k views which is good, but not nearly as much as i expected from it. I haven't seen anything else like that but if people don't like it.. Meh idk

 

I think he meant when a lot of the community thought that this was just a proof of concept/engine to be sold to other companies. People like Kurtjmac really contributed to that idea, he was so surprised whenever the devs added anything video game like.

 

anybody who ever thought that has no familiarity with the past actions of tdev

 

Cos school has started in most places I think... And well I think the target audience is people who are too young to drive/can't afford it, so when they go back to school and run out of time etc then the numbers fall. Average age of these newcomers is probably around GCSE or 13-16 so they are now doing school work instead of crashing virtual cars.

And for the infrequent updates argument, we'll actually this is probably the fastest updating simulation game I know, think Wreckfest and X-Plane. Very slow compared to the relatively rapid updates on BeamNG.

Also the community is amazing here, very very responsive, I had to wait two weeks for help getting my X-Plane install working and figuring out the error code... BeamNG it's a matter of minutes/hours! It is not toxic at all, maybe the hype train can run away but Nadeox can easily apply the brakes by axing the thread. This is a truly amazing community, churning out wonderful mods almost once every 2 months which is high for an accurate sim!