Tony Gardner announced yesterday iRacing will increase pricing membership plan from 1 august onward. Changes are as follows:

The price increase will take place on or around August 1, 2016. We will simply increase our subscription rates by $1 per month for our monthly subscription and less than $1 per month on our three, twelve month and two year subscriptions. Additionally, we are going to modify our bulk content purchasing discount program slightly. We are going to reduce our six piece bulk purchase discount from a 20% to 15% discount. We are going to reduce our 25% 40 piece loyalty program from a 25% to a 20% discount.

As you see it is not a big change and given the length of the post Tony Gardner explained, it was a very difficult decision to make trying to provide an smooth transition. Others will remain the same.

There will be no change to our 3 piece bulk purchase discount. That will stay at 10%. Same with our 100% content discount, that will stay at a 30% discount. We will make no changes to the price of our content, (cars and tracks), prices will stay at the current prices! We are not making any changes to our official series participation program in which you can earn $40 in credits per year or our referral program in which you can earn unlimited credits by referring a friend at $10 per friend. Hosted session pricing and discounts will also not change.

As always, a big thread in General forum has already evolved with lot of reactions to these changes, from people screaming and crying to people who remain calm and stoic.

Mr Gardner has explained things are becoming more complex and is necessary to match inflation changes and cover rising costs over these 8 years since the initial release. Community keeps growing and improvements to the basic concept are needed.

In order to keep doing what we are doing and continue to evolve we obviously need our revenue to at least get close to matching our costs. I’m glad we have grown each year in customer numbers as we have been able to cover most of our increasing investment and rising costs by doing that.

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This is not an easy decision but ultimately we have decided for the good of the overall business it is time to have a minor price increase to compensate for just a fraction of the inflation experienced over the 8 years.

Also, Mr Gardner announced, there is a 25% off renewals discount now running until 30 June.

I also want to mention we are having a 25% off discount immediately (this week) for any type of membership and we will run the sale through the end of June. Again the minor price increases does not take place until August 1 so you can also lock in the current membership pricing now and extend your membership well into the future at the current pricing. In that sense, as a current member you can avoid the minor price increase well into the future. Again also on top of that do not forget about the 25% discount sale running through the end of June on any membership type (1 month, 3 month, 1 year, 2 year).

This is the first year where the old promotions, like 100×75 and 50% off renewals will disappear in order to increase the overall membership expenditure once the past years revenues have shown iRacing is profitable. We will have to wait to November, and BF promo, to confirm it.