Then it evolved to Ultimate Team microtransactions. In the olden days it was about bringing an unending stream of Sims expansion packs to shop shelves. Perhaps not by coincidence, it’s a business model that bears some resemblance to EA’s famously profitable market position. The purpose of Dovetail’s voluminous DLC, Rissik says, is to give people options. Some people love 1970s British diesel locomotives but hate high-speed electric trains. People want to collect different things.” And then you dip in and out as you want to because in this enthusiast market, it’s a bit like music tastes, there’s genres within genres. What we want to do is offer you a range of stuff. We don’t expect you to buy everything that we make. No retailer would expect you to buy everything in their store. “The thought that I’ve always had,” says Rissik, “is that if you go to Tesco, they don’t expect you to buy everything in. It’s clear that sim developers view their products as platforms, as much as games themselves. Prior to that, Train Simulator 2020 made the headlines for listing over $10,000 in DLC on its Steam store page. And both of Dovetail’s train sims have attracted attention for the volume of DLC available in them.Īt the time of writing, Train Sim World has released 88 individual pieces of DLC content since release in September 2023. Flight Simulator 2020 has not only released numerous first-party DLC packs but also hosts a third-party marketplace stuffed to the gills with extras. Assetto Corsa Competizione, the people’s racing sim, launched in 2019 and has released a steady stream of car and track packs since then. It’s not just the blurry line between player and developer that marks simulators like Train Sim World 4 out as separate to the mainstream industry. Nevertheless, Peddlesden took part in a 28-hour charity stream “off his own back” days before our conversation. Processes refined, work-life balances attained. There was no line of delineation between work and leisure. In the ‘old days’ that meant the team would go home and play the game they’d just been developing all day. Having a passion for the subject matter is a common route into the studio, Rissik explains. “Amazing people who are passionate about trains and train simulation, supplemented with young people out of university and videogames professionals.” “I’ve always wanted to have this blend,” says Dovetail CEO Jon Rissik. There have been tales of modders making the jump into development for as long as there have been modders and game developers, but in sim development it stands especially to reason: there’s nobody in the world more passionate about getting a carriage livery exactly right as the person who’s made it in their own time. Simulator developmentĪnd that’s not an uncommon story in the realms of simulator development. The train enthusiast has inadvertently become a game developer. With access to a whole community of like-minded creators, he began co-ordinating the development of bigger add-on pack projects with multiple collaborators and disciplines involved. That led to Peddlesden running a website called UK Train Sim, which ran for over 20 years and hosted a quarter of a million members at its peak. In one case there was an add-on called LTV or Erie Mining Company and they were missing a cab. And I helped other third party add-on developers with the bits they were missing. “I started working with other commercial groups and got some of my work published in add-ons. “I started teaching myself how to do my own repaints of things and sharing them.”įrom there, he began to collaborate. “One of the things I started doing was content creation,” says Peddlesden. It was also the first step towards making games. For people like Peddlesden, the advent of Microsoft Train Simulator in June 2001 was the first chance to take the step beyond the model train sets and into something more interactive. That interest escalated when train simulators started entering the game industry.
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