People complain about costs but much of that comes not from greed but lack of customers. Look at it this way. New DLC for Euro Truck Simulator 2 costs about $10. A DLC for TSW can be $30-$40. Why? There are about 30 times as many people playing the other game. It takes a set amount of money to develop a DLC...then you divide the cost between as many customers as you can. The more customers... the less you need to make on each customer. Let's say it costs $200,000 to have 5 developers work 6 months on a new product. Selling say 5,000 train sim DLC at $40 generates $200,000 of income. Minus $200,000 you are breaking even. Selling 150,000 truck sim DLC at $10 each generates $1,500,000 of income. Minus $200,000 you make $1.3 million in profit and still offer a lower price. It's not just "trains" either. It's any niche market. Other "niche" games like Digital Combat Simulator for example with similar levels of "simulation" and small customer base sell their DLC for $50-$70 for a SINGLE plane or map. I'm not saying we could get 30 times as many train simmers like they have truck simmers, but in theory, if we could double the customer base of TSW, it could drop the cost of DLC by half.
Because ETS was mentioned I'm obviously going to take this opportunity and I did write out a huge thing about how great SCS is, and how much they actually care for their community instead of the money unlike DTG, but ill just say, DTG will never be even half of the developer SCS is. SCS don't cut corners in their DLC, don't give us lazy content or cash grabs, they give us new trucks for free, they didn't make us buy a single other game for 13 years now, they are currently reworking the entire base map for free, then all of the DLC maps and all of the game updates are completely free. What does DTG do? Ah yes, they release £8 green Thomas scam pack, which requires the other Thomas DLC and WSR... Seriously, what a joke when you compare it. Being so deep into TSW and ETS2, it really just sucks to see what could be...
Well they do (by TSW standards) "cut corners" in many ways. For example, they have "simplified" AI, you can't leave the cab and walk around, the AI "spawn closets" are very obvious, they don't make maps 1:1 and accurate down to the individual buildings.... But, it's expected and there's no TSW level "expectation" that it'll be super-realistic. It's more comparable to TSC than TSW in complexity. They also don't give you DLC for free. To get more map, you need to buy more content. You can play the same base maps of TSW over and over if you want too. You don't "have" to buy any TSW content either. TSW 5 was free for the core for people who didn't want more routes. And finally the amount of DLC is small compared to TSW. There's again not the expectation to get multiple releases every month. People aren't expecting "German content" or "Passenger buses" in ATS either. They are focused on a very narrow market and do their job well. However, the original point about cost remains. If there were more players, costs would go down. That doesn't address the "huge umbrella" approach of TSW however. That's an entirely different issue.
The default trucks in both ETS2 and ATS sound awful since they switched to FMod. Pretty much unplayable without mod sounds. However SCS do seem to run their business very well and don’t seem 110% profit driven like DTG who sorry to say sometimes come across as charging as much as they can get away with the minimum acceptable level of completed quality. SCS seem to have a long term plan and as noted they go back and rework old DLC to bring it up to standard. DTG are content to fire and forget and as regards the core often seem more focused on trivial or irrelevant changes than serious QOL updates. The truck games do impart more of a sense of purpose running and building your own company. However they can still suffer from A to B syndrome doing random jobs. However SCS sometimes move very slowly. Nordic Horizons for ETS2 was announced probably a year ago and still doesn’t have a confirmed release date. One of their most eagerly awaited maps and likely Day One for many of us, but where the absolute fudge is it?! They announced Iceland as the next map, after NH, and I seriously doubt we will see that before 2027.
Truck sim is a management type game as well as a sim so offered twice as much to potential customers.
Yeah I agree with everything here, the sounds are weird in ETS and ATS, its like they are gameified and put slight exhaust sounds in the interior. It doesn't actually sound like how the interior of a truck sounds. And I don't quite understand why its this way. It does feel like they work quite slowly on map DLC, especially right now with Nordic Horizons, they must have been working on it for 2 years now. Not building the map for 2 years but all of the research and pre-production stuff combined. Its just such a huge area to cover, its going all the way to the top of Norway. Not only this but they are planning to release a reskin update of the Scandinavia DLC at the same time, so I guess they might be holding off on one or the other slightly. ATS is a completely different story though, that game gets new map DLC all the time, there's one coming out in 10 days! Simply because one state is a smaller area to cover I guess.
