the sim racing esports bubble is just that: a bubble.
eventually the corpos are gonna realize their money can be better spent elsewhere, take their ball and leave.
and when that happens i'll still be here having fun making car go fast while everyone else runs around and screams like the sky is falling.
something huge has to change in sim racing to make the esports bubble stop being a bubble. rennsport is close. they managed to build a format that makes sim racing exciting, but it's still racing real cars on real tracks with high potential for setup exploits and physics bugs to be abused. eventually its esports scene will crumble as the most talented drivers fall away to people who figured out the shortcomings in the simulation accuracy to give themselves an unfair advantage.
even then, it's still sim racing. people love watching F1 and NASCAR, but nobody watches the esport variants. why would they? it's just pretend cars on a pretend race track, what reason does anyone have to watch a bunch of gamers pretending to do the real thing when the real thing is better in every other way? would Drive to Survive be as popular as it is if it was about the Codemasters video game?
until sim racing can figure out a way to make their shit unique and separated from real motorsport, it's just gonna be a big fat nothingburger compared to all the other esports.
but, that's not gonna happen. sim racers won't buy a game with fake cars and fake tracks, they want the real deal. they want muh realism.
so when that bubble pops, competitive sim racers are gonna have to learn how to have fun in a sim again. and frankly, given the sheer lack of attention afforded to people like me because I wasn't ruining the fair competition with fucked up bullshit in the setup menu, i won't be the one to teach em how. they got their secret sauce and won't let anyone else have it or learn how to make it, so why should i