SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone - Editorial: It's Supposed to Be a Two-way Street

"Do we know if the people having problems are very few but just very vocal, or if the number of people having issues is more than a few? Any plans as to what will be done?"

For "we" read "you", as in do 10Tacle and SimBin know.

It is now Sept. 20th and despite sending an additional reminder Friday the 16th, I have not heard one word from 10Tacle. I don't think it is unfair to expect some sort of acknowledgment from 10Tacle by now though, even if it is just a brief message to the extent of saying something like "We're working on it, expect some answers within xx days". But the silence on the part of 10Tacle is roaring.

Analysis

10Tacle/SimBin have to make it work, and they have to learn to communicate with customers who ask questions, even if the questions concern perceived shortcomings in the product.

An unsatisfied customer who talks is an opportunity to improve the product.

An unsatisfied customer who walks ultimately can cost the company it's life.

RaceMore will have to be fixed, as will online in general, and other bugs that are currently showstoppers to some customers.

RaceMore is interesting in the sense that I think it will be a part of the GT Legends online experience, and that means that two products depend on RaceMore working, and doing what it is supposed to do and with the minimum of bugs or hassle.

If RaceMore is going to be a pay-per-play service in the future as indicated by SimBin, they have a very real interest in getting it to work and as customers we can take some comfort from that.

Being a newcomer, SimBin's first product was far from perfect when it was released in German territories in October 2004. Through patches some things were improved, others weren't. Perhaps the patches fixed issues for some users, but the users whose issues were not fixed don't really benefit a lot from that. In some cases things that worked pre-patch were broken post-patch.

With a May 2005 release covering the rest of the world, including the Scandinavian countries (and SimBin home territory Sweden), and an announced release of Oct. 2005 for their second product GT Legends, some customers will have had GTR for almost a year now, while others still think of it as a newly released sim.

So while GTR in the minds of SimBin and 10Tacle may be getting old and yesterday's news having received three or four patches as well as some hotfixes, some of us have only recently broken the wrap off the box, and are wondering if the remaining bugs will be addressed and rectified.

In principle it is very easy: I think 10Tacle has to be seen by the customers to address the problems, chart them, find out how many users are affected by this or that problem. Look for common denominators. Work the problems and work with the community to solve the problems. Keyword here is "seen". As in visibility. All the information is available on the official GTR forums, posted by customers who took the time to write about their problems.

OK, some posters didn't post in the right thread or got carried away a bit. But there is not one single statement from the publisher about what has been instigated in terms of corrective action.

I think that part of the overall problem here is that someone has chosen the wrong kind of PR policy for SimBin's products.

Instead of trying to emulate big business by sending out pre-prepared messages, press releases, renders and screenshots ad nauseam, if they just communicated with us like the budding developer they are, ensuring good contact with their fan-base, and independent sites like SimHQ — if they were seen to take customer issues seriously, the current minefields in the forums on the official FIA GTR site might become a place one would want to visit on a regular basis.

We don't know if there are many unsatisfied customers out there or if there are only a "few", relatively outspoken dissatisfied customers. The point here is that if 10Tacle SimBin don't know either, they are in deep trouble.

Instead of being seen to do something to help their customers with problems, they roll on the media and PR machine in preparation for the launch of GT Legends, and Head of studio Ian Bell drops into forums on RacesimCentral, hinting this and that, but not giving out any solid information, just stating that "the netcode is new" and referring to a press-release, to appear sometime in the future.

I feel like we've been down this road once before, leading up to the release of GTR.

As any person with a bit of knowledge about product marketing, branding and PR can tell you, if the gap between marketing and real life becomes too big, a very real potential for backlash exists.

Hiding from issues ain't going to make them go away. As long as reasonable queries from the community are not met with sensible answers, the basic issues will rear their heads again and again.

Trying out the demo of GT Legends, it seems to be shaping up nicely but we won't know for sure until it is tested in the real world by customers who bought and paid for it. From comments on forums I gather that quite a few will be sitting on the fence this time round, waiting for the hype to settle and allow the time for potential issues to have surfaced, before they decide if they will buy it.

Once burned, twice shy, as the saying goes.

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