For a company as small as Codemasters who have around 400 people working for them compared to a company like EA who have around 9k people working for them if not more, aswell as they have 3rd company companies also working on games for them. Codemasters just have 400 people who do everything for the games, aswell as lets not forget they also have to develop the much loved dirt and grid series of games. They have less than 1 year to develop an f1 game, and have even less time to get the handling as realistic as possible only have maybe 3 months to make large changes to the car, and having to go off predictions that engineers give them, when in realism it could be different however engineers and aero dynamists are very intelligent people so do get it right for the most part. Leading on from this, that is why we do get lack of features and get bugs a lot of time, because they don’t have the time with the staff they have who already work their arses off to get is the best they possibly can which I am very grateful of. I do understand that also EA do make multiple series of games also but they also have years to develop games aswell, whereas Codemasters have around 9 months or less once they start even thinking about the new game. However, from what I understand they started on f1 2017 before f1 2016 even released which is great to here, and that is possibly the reason we get some of these small issues as they again have even less people to check and test the games features again! Say if they started developing the game in July which sounds realistic to me. They probably were developing the base game up until November/December which is near enough half a year. I say this as in the last game they said’ one of our workers spent his whole Christmas developing the formation laps’ which to me sounds like these niche little new features which are very nice to have are not started work on up until this point. Codemasters have life very hard as they have a lot of fans who demand stuff, but have to stick with the guidelines of FOM, and then have to balance that with the fans and the amount of time they have and what they’re workers can do. Aswell as since they are a relatively small business, they don’t really have the power to be able to fight it with FOM!
This is why I would also not expect anything in terms of features until f1 2018 or maybe a later patch or even DLC as, they ofcourse are a small company who does not get a massive amount of sales which is why I would except payed DLC from Codemastes however not micro-transactions as I just dislike them in the first place; carrying on from my main point, they can’t just magic up all the new features in 6 months as right now they are working very hard to finalise the handling and also get the teams and cars correct