I'd like to start out this commentary on racing by talking about Major League Baseball. Baseball is America's favorite pastime, but it has had its share of ups and downs. The people in charge of the game have made decisions that some baseball traditionalists say the sport still hasn't recovered from. In 1994 they added two expansion teams, and this seriously reduced the average overall quality of pitchers in the league. It took a few years before enough top notch pitchers could be found to fill all the spots available, and in the mean time ERA stats were at their worst. When things finally did start to make a turn for the better, the powers that were decided to add two more teams to the league and start this cycle all over again. That meant twenty new pitchers and thirty new players had to be found, and while that hunt continues the game suffers.

Now how does this all relate to sim-racing? To understand that, lets take a quick look at the history of our sport. Doing this from memory, my chronology might not be 100% accurate but the main point will still get across. I'll stick mainly to discussing the stock car simulations, but there are other sims that are just as important to this whole scenario.

The original Nascar 1 by Papyrus had a small but dedicated following, and the "Hawaii" dial-in servers gave this group a place to get together and build a feeling of community. Nascar 2 came out and the number of internet racers exploded. The TEN multiplayer hosting service was introduced and the community grew. There are drivers who would call this the "golden age" of sim-racing. Sometime later Grand Prix Legends came out, and although it wasn't a big hit to the mass market, it was such a great simulation that many of the top stock car drivers went on to form a community of their own and leave Nascar behind. Viper Racing had a similar affect when it was released, although not to the same extent.

Then TEN was shut down. Thousands of racers were left stranded, and it took a while for us to recover from this blow to our sport. Nascar 3 was released and the WON matching service was available to us, but it just wasn't the same. Racers are dedicated people though, and through the efforts of some in the private sector the environment was made more suitable and the community was able to continue. Other games started hitting the store shelves, and racers had many more choices than ever before on what kinds of cars they could drive. Dirt Track Racing, Nascar Legends, DTR Sprint Cars, and Nascar Heat all gave the Papyrus Nascar series some competition that it never had before. The problem here though is that the community isn't growing as fast as the games are coming out. Now even Papyrus' own Nascar 4 demo is competing with Nascar 3 for racer's time, and there just aren't enough good drivers to go around.

Major League Baseball is able to continue successfully; even after the expansion decisions that some consider to be questionable. Maybe we are in a "rebuilding" stage similar to what MLB was in the years after they added new teams. MLB has a much deeper history and a much stronger foundation to rebuild on than does the sport of sim-racing. Only time will tell if we can keep the multiplayer racing community together and continue successfully. I'm sure the software developers will continue to make money, and the number of drivers will continually increase. There will always be other cars out there to race against, but there'll be less and less people that you know and recognize actually driving those cars. The racing community is changing from "Mayberry", where everybody knows everyone, to "New York City", where you don't even look at the guy next to you on the subway; you just ride along with him until the next stop. The quality of these unrecognized drivers is what may be the problem, and it will be the "traditionalists" of sim-racing that might end up getting the short end of the stick.