[ARCHIVED] SCS General Discussion Thread

[FierbetoN]

They have licence for Setra too.

We already saw a Setra in Newsletter #1.

[Renshaw]

I won't be first in line... but I am on vacation for 2 weeks starting the 20th... so I'll be able to drive a LOT.

[Phantom19]

They had Setra already, but what is taking them 6 years on still making ECS, is it licensing or is it that they are slowly making bus stops and bus terminals. It should be a addon to ETS2 and not just a separate game because the map and gameplay will be same as ETS only new would be playable buses and bus stops.
The interior of that Scania bus in Squirrel's video at 8:17 is really interesting tho.

[FrancescoMasci]

There are a few useless (for now) bus stops in the map. I saw one in the new Lille, one in Bologna Italy and one in Turkey and that's those I remember. That probably means that they are working under the courtains but it's way too early to tell.

[Some newbie driver]

In fact @FrancescoMasci , there's a bus stop in every city or town in the game map. Sometimes it's just a bus stop at the side of a street, sometimes is the yard of a bus station (aprox 50/50 of ones and the others). And in newest DLCs there had been other potential bus stops in lots of places out of cities.

[TheTiger]

viewtopic.php?f=169&t=184440

Now I see the Newsletter for the first time in my life. Man, I have to admit that when they written it (5 years ago + 2 years of working already) it sounded like ECS is about to release. :/ But in reality, we didn't received even a teaser since then. I can't really understand why?

Why SCS you don't just release a DLC with buses? Can't two people in a 7 years to create a code to make a purpose for buses too? I've seen around the ETS2 map a lot of bus stops which gives me hope but srsly, there is no teaser since 5 years.

[timski]

As I recall, bus stops, and more specifically bus stations, have been a feature of ETS2 maps for at least 5 years. At this stage the issue is surely licensing (trying to get as many manufacturers onboard) or commercial (no cash to fund risky new ventures).

The working presumption is that this fabled coach simulator will still be a DLC, as indicated in the old newsletter. That original aproach perhaps made sense when ETS2 had just one map expansion of similiar quality to the original game, and no realistic expectation of long run (decade later) commercialisation. But I'd like to suggest it now makes most commercial sense to add coaches for free:

1. For pure profit, SCS should launch a new game called ECS, selling all the existing tech and maps to an audience specifically interested in buses. Except that would mean serious work on the older areas of the map, since areas such as Britain or Poland would not meet player expectations of a "new" 2020-era game. ECS would likely have to evolve backwards, with Iberia as the default base map. Meanwhile players of both ECS and ETS2 would bemoan buying basically the same map DLCs twice, denting goodwill toward SCS.

2. Selling a coach simulator DLC addon to ETS2 has a couple of commercial weaknesses. First, unless SCS change their approach to instead sell vehicles one by one, a coach DLC would be limited to one sale per person only. Yes, map DLCs would become marginally more valuable to players (since they could play both trucks and buses), but expecting a lot of extra map sales as a result would be naive. Critically, a coach DLC approach is unattractive to those only interested in coaches, since they would have to pay twice just to get started (ETS2 plus DLC), while ETS2 would continue to be seen as fundamentally a truck game with little more than a coach mod tacked on.

3. The calculation behind a free coach sim addition to ETS2 (perhaps renaming the whole game "ET&CS") presumes that this would tangibly increase the playerbase of ETS2, and thus lead to a lot more business over the long term, especially in sales of map expansions (which appear to be SCS's main revenue stream now). Partly that's engaging potential players that are only interested in bus sims. Partly that's holding onto existing ETS2 players longer by offering them more (relaxed driving experience) content. Having reached the conclusion that coaches are best integrated into the core game, not provided as an optional extra, the game design logic shifts, allowing coaches to be properly built into, for example, the career mode (even if, in practice, few companies engage in both passenger and freight road transport).

[Some newbie driver]

@timski there's another option you didn't thought about. I explained a few times in the past.Resuming:

SCS can take everything related ONLY to trucks (the trucks themselves, the trailers, the market of cargo jobs...) and rip it off from the base code of the game and turn it an "kind of industry DLC" (to name it somewhat). It's something similar about how trucks in ATS are DLC already; but affecting not just a vehicle model but more assets and features.

What will remain? The map, the engines (physics, graphics, IA behavior, sound...), the general setup, menus and features common to any game they would want to run on the map we have now.

So, once that would be done, they will be able to sell the "base game + truck industry DLC" and label it ETS2; while they can sell the "base game + bus industry DLC" and label it as ECS (EuroCoach Simulator). Nobody will be forced to purchase a content they would want not and, at any moment, any owner of ETS2 or ECS could purchase the DLC that give him access to the other "industry" DLC; being able to play both trucks and buses in the same game and even the same profile.

The map DLCs will be exactly the same and needed to be purchased just once; the development of the base game features and bugfixes will remain on a single branch too (so, no developing overhead for SCS). They even could add more "industry" DLC to focus on other things that could take profit of the map and base game features. When the release that bus/coach mode, I'm really sure they will aim for something like this.

Regards

[Hakan]

@TheTiger aha i see it, that's a Setra S 431 DT an doubledeck bus, which i see it oftenly when i'm on the travel from belgium to turkey.
[ external image ]

[timski]

@Some newbie driver Fair comment. I'm clearly working from what is already released, where the truck industry part is already sold together with the base game. Pragmatically the whole franchise would need to become a "Long Distance Road Simulator", with every existing ETS2 licence upgraded with a free Truck DLC (to bring it back to the current content), with ATS merged into ETS2 (since the only real difference there would be maps). That would appeal to vehicle simulation fans (where the idea of using sometimes hundreds of DLC or Mod options is accepted), but less so the core videogames market, which traditionally expected to buy one big topic-encompassing title, and has only recently got used to the idea of having most of the gameplay locked away in optional DLC.

Regardless, in all this it remains unclear just how applicable the curent map scale and wider design is to other industries: Based on the history of ATS we might conclude that maps have to be very carefully balanced to make specific drives enjoyable. Ergo what works for trucks may well not work well for anything else on wheels. Indeed, were new ETS2 maps not still appearing with bus stops, we might conclude that SCS had realised that coaches could not simply sit atop a map built for trucks, and that ECS and ETS2 could do no better than share an engine and some assets - at which point they would be as separate as ATS and ETS2. That the bus stops persist suggests that coach and truck play is somewhat interchangeable.