How Iracing changed the Sim-Racing environment and became the leader of this mark
Racing, how beautiful is this word! This word can put stars in child’s eyes all over the world. Pilots, driving fast cars on the limit around beautiful places, playing with the danger and risk, winning trophies and again the next Sunday. That what makes racing incredible and untouchable at the same time. Nobody can buy a Formula one and only a few peoples can afford a GT3 car. Therefore racing, no matter how it inspired people all over the globe, is not an accessible sport like tennis where it is easy to train and do what you love, isn’t it? Here come Sim-Racing, people racing on online games as close to reality as it could be. Big video games like Assetto Corsa Competizione, Project cars 2 and Iracing have taken this market in a great battle to know which one is the best and at the end, Iracing won, here is why:
Iracing can easily be described as the best Sim-Racing game ever due to how close it is to reality. But it is not the only point where Iracing is ahead in the market. Where Iracing redefined, the rules is on the communication side. Usually, Sim-Racing games are quiet on social media and do not organize a lot of events. And when they organize one, it is hard to know it for those who do not play the game. Iracing is doing this completely differently. First, they put their game in a totally different dimension. They organize a lot of events for the community but more important for pro-players and real pilots. We can take as example the eNASCAR Coca Cola Iracing Series which was broadcasted on Fox Sports in March 2020 with more than 903 000 people watching it or the IndyCar Iracing Challenge where real IndyCar pilots drove in the game or the still ongoing Porsche Tag Heuer Esports Super cup event. The fact that real life pilots play on this game make it more visible and more people want to play it. These pro-players bring a lot of new players that do not know Iracing or even do not play Sim-Racing. That is a great way to make nearly free advertisement all over the world. People watch pro-players driving cars without doing any mistakes on beautiful tracks. March 2020 was a peak with all the lockdowns in the world. The number of streams exploded and so the number of people subscribing at Iracing. They jump from 6 000 peoples connected every day to 15 000 at the end of April 2020. Today more than 160 000 players are paying every month to play Iracing.
But organizing events is only one of the strengths that Iracing developed. Secondly, they have created a real relationship with people on social media. You can see official Iracing content everywhere. Like on YouTube with 2 videos posted every month on the official account. The Iracing Top 10 Highlights and the Iracing NOT Top 10 Highlights where they put respectively all the best and worst moments that happened in the month. They also provide one post every day on their Instagram and are very present on their Twitter account posting a lot of information and jokes. What make it different is that now, no matter if you play the game or not, you have pictures, information, clips and tips every month for zero dollar! In contrary, Assetto Corsa Competizion is quiet with a lot less content posted on social media. It makes a big difference when customers want to have a game with a big community playing it. On one hand they have a brand that put many contents online of their players and on the other hand, games that do not post a lot or anything on social media. Therefore, Iracing win a lot of clients by showing people playing their game.
Another thing that Iracing changed in the Sim-racing world is the way games are close to big real-life brands. In cars games there are a lot of brand because of the car’s brands. The more cars your games have, the more brands you have in it. But these brands are most of the time only partners in the developments process. They send telemetries and data about the car so the game developers can make it as close as possible to the real one. But Iracing goes again further, they make big real-life brand that are not only cars brands take a step in the game. Like Coca Cola when it became the official sponsor of an Iracing event or Porsche organizing their official Esports competition on Iracing. But other brands are linked to Iracing on different levels like Kimoa, Fanatec, Nvidia and a lot more. Their brand image make the game more popular and more visible. This link makes Iracing one step further in front of their competitors.
To conclude, Iracing has set the new standards for the Sim-Racing market by being the leader since 2018. They tremendously improved the communication side of that kind of game. Those “innovations” make them the leader of this market today and for the future years! If we need to summarize the philosopher’s stone that Iracing created: Organizing events with the community and real known drivers, making your game open to people by posting content on social media as a common thing and finally, making real-life brands involved in your game.
