Wow. The day of general release, and this thread is dead as a doornail, dead dead.
I still remember the DiRT 4 OT activity. There was a LOT more going on than there is here for GRID and that DiRT 4 tanked
super bad comercially. 35k steam copies in the first week or so iirc? Codies had talked about DLC plans for that before release; didn't come to that, they never made any DLC for DiRT 4.
I also think that Codemasters biggest successes DiRT 2 and og GRID came at a time when the average gamer didn't distinguish between arcade racer and sim. It was just assumed that you can't make realistic car behavior, so racing game gameplay was basically a style choice with the immersive-realistic and awesome-fun as the big scales they were judged on. Meaning GRID and DiRT 2 were in the same market as Need For Speed, Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport (except, at least for me, Forza only really became a big player from FM3 onward), but at the time, there was only GT5 Prologue and Xbox and PC didn't have anything really mainstream big.
Nowadays Forza is on PC, there is the more fun-leaning Forza Horizon too, on PS4 GTS, NFS and the sim'ier games like Assetto Corsa and Project CARS 2 are there too.
Codemasters strategies were actually pretty smart, if you ask me after Grid 2 was their first big, big failure:
- learn your lesson from the failures of Grid 2 (no cockpit cams, too arcady compared to what the mainstream wanted at the time), make a successor with minimal effort to try and get the GRID fans on board again:
GRID Autosport [=>problem was, it was a last-gen game when the people who buy more than 2-3 games a year had caught on the next-gen very quickly in 2014)
- try to survive as a studio by going back to your roots and into a niche but thirsty hardcore market - make a sim-like barebones hardcore rally game (of which there were zero on the market back at the time): DiRT Rally [=>big success]
- learn from the problems that many players had with DiRT Rally - a) it was too hard for most players, b) it had too few courses for the hardcore. So make a rally game that a) was sim and had a beginner/arcadier handling mode too and b) had randomly generated tracks: DiRT 4 [huge failure, the track generator was extremely repetitive after even 6h of play, the sim mode was unrealistically not-hardcore, not oversteery enough and nobody was interested in the beginner mode in terms of buying incentive, because nobody buys a game to play on "loser mode"]
- learn your lesson from DiRT Rally and DiRT 4 - (1) people don't want to hear of feel that they are not good at driving and (2) the hardcore market is too niche to raise the studio back up to former glory at early PS3/X360 times. So, divide your attention, (2) make a hardcore rally game, that is for the hardcore but at a budget that the studio can turn a good profit on from the fairly small market (also sell reused assets as DLC); (1) try make a super inventive arcade driving game that doesn't depend on good racing skills to be fun: Onrush [=>Onrush had good reviews but there was no market and especially no market at that price point, also user opinions were kinda mixed and no fantastic word of mouth meant that even big sales weren't working either]
- be realistic about the size of the market and shut down the Onrush division. New idea... nope, all strategy used up, maybe hope that it's been long enough and people want to play GRID again... with not realistic but fun handling and good atmosphere... the things that made the first GRID and DiRT 2 awesome: GRID (2019)
To be honest, I would run out of ideas too. They have DiRT Rally and the F1 games and those turn a small survivable profit that can be repeated as often as they like (unless the WRC games now it DiRT Rally's breakfast, most reviewers seemed to think WRC8 is a better game than DR2), but beyond that, they just don't stand a chance in the current market. Maybe they could make a next-gen day1 graphic showpiece that would sell well? No, I even doubt that... Xbox will have a Forza 8 day1 probably and Playstation will have learned from their mistakes and have a GT7 in the first year with just reused assets from GTS, but with dynamic weather and ToD and 500+ cars and ray-traced lighting conditions and maybe new VR capabilities.
