Update Speculation thread

It's early days anyway. I think BeamNG will really take of after 1.0. With the way it's going (which is a lot of directions and all of them good) I think it will be revolutionary in the game/simulator sphere.

 

Beam is already really popular, all things considered. I think they’re a few key items away from blowing up, mainly an official and structured multiplayer (free roam, race, police chase, scenarios, etc.) with stat tracking. That’s my dream though and I hope it’s the Devs as well

 

the ingame ai needs improving, police chases, destruction derby toggle etc, particle fx remastering too, only ever so slighty things to be improved upon they've really done an outstanding job.
The tire physics is gonna be wild too, full on racing on race tracks, there's so much potential.

 

I looked through Steam's client update archives (didn't take too long, thankfully - I just didn't think to look for that before), and found this update from late-October of 2019. I think that's the reason why.

As ShakeandBake said, Beam is a juggernaut already, especially considering what it is. That 36K peak puts it in 11th place for driving games - and it's regularly in the top 3 for concurrent players, usually below ETS2. Tokyo Xtreme Racer had a peak of ~16K on release, and now regularly gets 500-1,000 players. My Summer Car had a peak of less than 6,000 players and regularly gets 2,000-3,000. Even Snowrunner had a peak of 11K a couple years ago, with regular peaks of 5-8K. These peaks are often lower than Beam's daily troughs - and it dunks on Snowrunner for daily peaks (20-30K outside of updates for the past year). Beam's also in the top 50 for daily active users - which is absolutely wild.

I think the issue (and why Beam still feels so small) is that there's not much of a narrative in Beam, in the same way there is for MSC or Teardown or Snowrunner. Few of the big general gaming Youtubers (like TheRussianBadger or Martincitopants) make videos for them, and if they have, it hasn't been for several years (i.e. Nerd3's video on Beam in 2013). On the other hand, Beam's always been one of the "old reliable" games. So many big titles (The First Descendant, Splitgate 2, Schedule 1, etc.) gain massive player numbers in the first week or two, then lose more than 90% of those players within the next three months (for SG2, it took them about a month to do that). Beam didn't have a huge peak early on - it took about eight years to crack 10K players (0.22, March 2021), but it doesn't drop much below that on off-hours. Which means that...

...if multiplayer were to become a part of the game, there'd already be plenty of people to play with. It's proven to work well enough for BeamMP - they regularly get hundreds of people playing on their servers. My only question is - how's BeamNG going to pay for the server maintenance and moderation? TABG went free-to-play and added paid cosmetics to keep the servers running in 2021, but they only have around 500 players at most to worry about (and they don't do big content updates anymore). BeamNG would have to keep doing its major content updates and pay to run the servers at the same time, if they want to keep growing.

Also, I'm not sure why the devs didn't add a lowboy trailer to haul the two new vehicles around - maybe that'll be added in a future update. The Aurata got a whole new tilt trailer to haul it around on in 0.30, and we got a whole bunch more trailers and trailer variants in 0.31-0.33 (and the new spinner trailer in 0.37).

 

@DriftinCovet1987

I agree with everything you’re saying, and that’s why I don’t expect it to happen anytime soon. It really is a logistical headache and we’re lucky BeamMP does a surprisingly good job. Maybe if they get the game to state where they say, yea this warrants a full price tag (I already think it does) and then they continue to release content through DLCs to keep content flowing and servers running.

 

I honestly feel like the A.I. has gotten way worse this update. Not the traffic, but when you tell them to chase, flee, etc. In 0.37, they braked early before a sharp turn and they never floored it on curves. But I saw all of the improvements in the patch notes so I'm hoping this is simply a small bug. I'll have to do some more testing, though.