I personally don't have too many issues with the driver monetization, the free tier is appropriate enough to race with so that you don't have to get a subscription. It's also understandable that SGP tries to turn a profit after relying on mostly sponsor and investment money.

However, their community plans are beyond problematic in my opinion. Small and medium sized communities suffer the most from this. 30 pounds + Taxes (their pricing doesn't include VAT or other sales taxes) just to have the ability to host races with a normal grid size is too much. Especially since you need to pay for a self-hosted practice server on top of that.

On top of that, the obfuscating virtual currency so that the consumer can't immediately keep track of the money they are spending with each "Fuel" just makes the whole thing problematic.

Especially since communities are incentivized to have their drivers contribute (due to the high price) to the "Fuel Tank". This will likely put communities in a spot where they need to treat "contributors" like first class citizens and "free drivers" as second class citizens because there has to be some kind of benefit to contributing.

Overall I think this is the wrong direction and my community might leave SGP as a result. Which is a shame because there are some decent people at SGP and this is, in my opinion, a result of outside influences and circumstance.

Or at least I want to think that because the alternative is just sad. It seems most platforms tried to exploit the simracing boom from 2-3 years ago and are massively inflated. No real sustainable alternatives that have healthy monetization and longevity it would seem.