So Many Paid Services...

I am not talking about iRacing itself. I believe that what iRacing is charging is fair these days. I am talking about the community itself. There are so many paid third party tools, applications, overlays, setup shops, car painting services. Every corner you turn, someone is trying to charge you a subscription for something. Back in the day, things like setups and car paints were free. I used to go on NR03 forums where you could request someone paint a car for you. Someone would do it in a day or two at no cost. Now the forums are full of people charging $20+ for a car paint. Same goes with setups, these used to be shared across the board. Now there's got to be a hundred setup shops and services. Nobody really cares to share, and these setup shops will even threaten legal action if you share a paid setup. I bet that would hold up in court well. I downloaded simhub to load in a custom dashboard on my extra monitor. Of course simhub wants a donation to unlock features, sure I'll donate. Then I download lovely dash to use on simhub and they want a monthly subscription to unlock features as well.

iRacing really should get a handle on some of this. Good, useful overlays should be implemented directly into the service. iRacing provided setups should be adequate, we shouldn't be forced to run fixed races or pony up money for a setup to be competitive. Also, let these setup shops know they don't own any legal rights over a setup. That's not how that works.