Trucksimulator24 - Die freundliche Trucksimulator Community rund um den Euro Truck Simulator 2, Euro Trucksimulator, German Truck Simulator, 18 Wheels of Steel Reihe, Extreme Trucker und den ZModeler.

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Questions:
1 – When did the desire to create a simulator trucks?

When we started SCS Software, the plan was to build a technology company, we were just a few programmers doing graphics code. But later we decided to switch focus and start building complete games including graphics. So we had to hire also artists to build a team with full range of skills. We approached publishers, looking for contract work on a game, any game basically, and one of the first types of games that was requested from us was a long haul truck driving game. And this way Hard Truck 18 Wheels of Steel game was born, our very first truck sim. That was almost 9 years ago! The game was a modest success, so the publisher wanted a sequel, than another sequel, and this way we started the long 18 Wheels of Steel series.

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2 – Why the first titles were on American trucks?

That wasn’t our choice, that was due to the American publisher and their need to have a game interesting for Northern American customers. Only later, when we no longer were fully dependent on publisher money, we have tried doing our own games, first smaller (like Bus Driver), and later bigger, like Euro Truck Simulator. Doing games from our own money, without publishers financing the work, was a huge risks, but fortunately so far it works.

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3 – Now with the blog, it’s easier to have ideas for new developments? The vast amount of information and requests received by the blog helps or hinders the work of you?

Reading the posts on the blog is an inspiration, definitely the dialog with the fan community is very useful, even though it’s a time consuming activity. We are often finding very useful feedback there, suggestions for things to fix, without the blog, we would just work blindly and with no way to correct problematic things.

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4 – How do you see piracy? For even with low price, your games are pirated.

Piracy is a problem, but every game developer and publisher is facing it, we are not alone. It is unfortunate, but we can only hope that over time, people playing our games fully understand that if they want us to improve, to develop even better games, there is no other way than to support us with paying for our work. SCS Software is investing all the money back into development immediately as it arrives, and Euro Truck Simulator 2 is a very hungry project that would easily swallow a higher budget if we had it.

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5 – You think about creating a system more secure against piracy of their games?

We are thinking of it, but at the same time, we do not want to punish the paying customers by asking them to fight with buggy DRM system only causing them trouble.

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6 – The Brazilian players can dream of a future Brazilian Truck Simulator?

We are aware that Brazil is a very big country with very strong transportation industry. We also know that we have a lot of fans in Brazil. The number of visitors to our scssoft.com website from Brazil is very high, for example from the server logs we see that in April, we had more visitors from Brazil than we had from Germany!
Unfortunately, even though we tried, we cannot find a distributor in Brazil for our games. We even asked for suggestions from fans, and got some tips on Brazilian game distribution companies, but so far we haven’t managed to get answers for our attempts to communicate. It would be a nice start to be able to offer our upcoming games to Brazilian fans for purchase in stores, any success on the market may motivate us in the future to look closer at opportunities developing for Brazil or perhaps even all of South America.

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7 – The SCS started listening to players to develop the new ETS2. This will help sales?

We have been always trying to read message boards on truck game fan sites, we always listened to community. It was never in our powers to implement all the wishes of the community, that is another matter, but we always kept the fans in mind. We are a small company, it takes us time to improve our games, but with each generation of games, we are going to get better and closer to the ideal. Our blog now offers us a new, two-way communication channel, we no longer just passively listen but also try asking for feedback, and we think involving the community in such way can really help us create a better game, and eventually even achieve better sales.

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8 – For a not too distant future, we can dream about the game online?

In the immediate future, I am afraid online multiplayer is not very likely. It is back to the problems mentioned above. Multiplayer is a big feature, certainly big for company our size. With the huge size of our map, and with the time it takes to deliver cargo, the players need to spend a lot of time in multiplayer to achieve some progress. Rather than isolated sessions, properly implemented multiplayer would require some sort of persistent game world to which players can log in, log off, and then return back again. Basically we’d need to write an MMO to do it right for people to be happy. This is a big task, all our programmers would do just this and nothing else if we wanted to have it done for our next game, and yet there are so many other features with high priority to implement. So we are back to where we started – with improvements in quality in our games, and with piracy rates getting lower, hopefully we will start making enough money to be able to finance our future projects better, hire more programmers, and add even more features that the fans are calling for, including multiplayer.
Pavel Sebor