Bottom post of the previous page:
Welcome to the forum .
I'm not a member of the NR2003 community, so I don't know how strong it is.
But the problem - for me - with iRacing is the subscription fee, rather than an up-front cost. I imagine existing NR2003 devs and players would continue to be drawn to a product that they already have, and in the modders case that they can control.
Over time it'll die off, but if it's strong now, it'll be fine for a while. The Age of Empires 2 community is still huge (bigger than for many, many years), and it's 22 years old.