Over the past week, MAK-Corp's leader Petros Mak had taken the time to contact the Simraceway.com (hereinafter refered to as SRW) management to get some official clarification in regards to what the management of SRW have planned for the changeover from the much loved rFactorcentral to Simraceway. As many of you will know, certain groups had started a boycott action against simraceway and the blog post on virtualr.net received quite a lot of responses from many of the community, myself included. What has come to my attention however is that the entire Boycott fiasco could have been avoided with a simple email to simraceway for more clarification. After receiving great details about simraceway, Petros Mak has gotten the authorization to clear the issues up in the community by making a news article here at MAK-Corp to detail the misconceptions that arose in the community.

The most important thing in the swith from rFc to SRW is that there will be absolutely no changes in the free aspect of the site. SRW will continue to provide free showcasing and downloading of mods in the exact same manner that rFactorcentral is currently doing. So to make it clear one more time, that aspect WILL NOT CHANGE! SRW will retain the free showcasing and downloading as rFc currently has. A lot of people in the community as well as mod groups were led to believe that SRW would charge a fee for downloading mods, this is NOT the case.

It is true that SRW will have a subscription based premium available which is purely optional. It is not required to have to showcase or download mods. The premium subscription gives you access to high speed download servers which rFc didn't offer. If you remember, at rFc you had to provide your own mirrors, and for some mods rFc would also mirror on a normal speed server. SRW are not changing that, all they are doing is adding their own high speed download servers for which you can use. This is a similar thing to paying sites like Rapidshare, Megaupload or even the very popular Fileplanet. Many mod groups have and do use those sites for their mods to be downloaded from. All those sites allow free normal/low speed downloading for common members, and high speed download access to premium subscribers. This is the exact same aspect at SRW. This is done to also allow people to be able to get all the mods or tracks or add ons they wish from one site, which will altimately provide fast download access.

Keeping in mind that subscription is for high speed download server access and of course online races on the SRW servers (which will not be using mod group mods) due to obvious problems that can arise just like the boycott issue. In my view, this is a good thing, while many in the community have been overthrown by the boycott with false rumors that SRW will be pay to download etc, clarification brings more details to this aspect and we can see that it is no different to sites like rapidshare, megaupload, fileplanet and many other download sites that we all use to mirror our mods. Discriminating SRW for providing us the same service as the previously listed services is just the same as complaining that Rapidshare, Megaupload and the rest are making money off our work too. Its just not right.

There were also fears that SRW would use mod group work or make money off it regardless of the mod groups decision to allow them or not. This is again a false rumor. SRW will retain the free racing servers that rFactor Central currently offers, and will also extend those to more available servers as demand grows. SRW is not currently focused on using mod groups work, as they understand in doing that, they need to get passed other hurdles first.

Jonathan of SRW also responded,

Monetizing Modders work

simraceway.com will be a free site with premium features that will command a monthly fee. The monthly fee is entirely optional and won’t require a user to pay to access your mod. Nor will we use your mods for prize based racing. Further, all aspects of the current site that are free, will remain free.

At this stage we’re not really focused on running modders work on the competition servers, we believe there are a number of challenges that would need to be resolved before that would make sense. However, we are absolutely committed to maintaining the free races currently on rfactorcentral.com and are increasing these to as many as demand requires.  The new races will be slightly different in that we’ll be asking the user base to vote for which cars and tracks (which will include community made mods) they want to see used in the next free races.

So to be 100% clear on this monetization issue - there will be no direct monetization of your work . The site will however generally monetize through premium features, which are largely focused towards online racing. However, one aspect of these premium features will be high speed downloads similar to that provided by Rapidshare and Megaupload (which charge $9.99 per month for this service) .

IP Rights / Commercialization

Regarding the fears of legal action from brand owners, I understand this and we are aware   of the problem generally. It is one that we have a fairly detailed plan to resolve. However, we feel the solution here lies in actually legitimizing modding as an activity, rather than just trying to keep its head below the radar. Obviously that means rights acquisition and we’ll talk more on that down the line.

In the interim the changes we’re making between rfactorcentral.com and simraceway.com are actually designed to reduce the potential legal exposure you may have on this matter  ‘Thank’ is a good example of this: It repositions the legal dynamic of ‘Donate’ -  instead of modders requesting donations, we are suggesting that users volunteer them. However, this is of course optional as well.

Can I also stress that to the extent any amounts are donated to modders, simraceway.com will not charge ANY fees (to either party) with respect to this transaction, even though we are providing the direct wallet functionality in the site which does bear a cost to us.  We consider this an important service for modders.

With regard creative commons licensing this is an initiative that we think could add value to solving the issue of some modders ripping other modders work. However that is obviously a separate IP issue to brand marks, and any CCL cannot be extended to cover brands and marques that are not owned or licensed and modders will need to include wording to this effect."

As a final note from Petros Mak

As you can see, the entire situation with the boycott seems rather silly now that we have more clarification of what SRW plan. This entire boycott issue could have been resolved and pretty much a non issue with a simple email, however parties involved decided to make it into a full blown scale war against SRW and to try to discredit them from the get go.

In light of this new official info from SRW management, MAK-Corp will support SRW and hopes other mod groups will decide to scrap the boycott and do the same. SRW is virtually the same as rFc, just providing extra features and content for the modders and the players. We need the spirit of rFactor and soon to come rFactor 2 to continue into the future, SRW are committed to providing that for the community not only in the same method that rFc did all the previous years, but with new additions and features that make the experience better for not only the modders who showcase their work, but also for the players that wish to download and be apart of supporting mod group's work. I urge every mod group to rethink the boycott issue and give SRW the same chance they gave rFc.