SCS Blog

A new year has started and it's time to plan a new season of our travel calendar. We would like to be even more active in traveling the world and visiting gaming and transportation industry expos and events. Ever since we built our custom SCS Sim Trailer, the impact factor that we can deliver on the various shows has grown massively! Being on the road allows us to meet many of you from our community and cross paths with a wide range of industry representatives which can lead to new and exciting opportunities. Everywhere we visit, we are always met with positive responses. Especially if we bring along our Sim Trailer, we always have a lot of visitors interested in trying our games on our motions seats or wanting to meet up with our On The Road crew. And we love meeting you! That's why we thought it would be a good idea to inform our fan base in advance and to share with you our tentative events calendar. And for 2019 we have a quite the list of 'to-visit' events. Keep in mind that some of these events are still being planned, and it may be that changes are made to our schedule. We cannot make it everywhere with the Sim Trailer, there are just too many places to go, packed too tightly in the calendar. We expect to organize some of the shows in partnerships with our friends from the transportation industry, but anyway, a core team from SCS should participate in all the events listed below. Keep an eye on our blog and social media profiles and we'll keep you updated. Check out our current schedule below, we might be travelling to an event near you! Last year we also enlisted the help of some of our local fans willing to help us on some of these events. We think it's a great way to connect with a few of our most loyal fans and offer them a very unique (and also paid) experience. If you would like to become a part of our crew for a weekend, please let us know. Successful candidates are 18+, native speakers of the region of a given event, have great social skills, they should be knowledgeable players of our games and active members of the fan community, ideally with a history of involvement with our betas, or perhaps recognised creators from the modding community. If you are free for two days of your time, have the skill and the passion to become a "roadie" and become embedded into our crew, please get in touch with us by mail on [email protected] View the full article

The holiday season is a time of rest for most people, but for the logistics industry, it is the busiest time of the year. The International Gift Delivery event on World of Trucks saw the community unite to bring much needed assistance to the North Pole and deliver gifts on both sides of Atlantic. A large number of our fans took up the challenge and dedicated their time over the festive period to delivering Christmas cargoes. In the first 48 hours, you had delivered over 250,000 cargoes! People actually noticed quickly that with each 250K milestone, a new hanging tree accessory was granted to players who had reached their personal contributions, which provided another boost to motivation. It's no wonder that you were quick to reach the 1 million cargoes delivered community goal, and went even further. The rate of deliveries completed even had Santa in North Pole shocked! Thank you to every single driver who contributed to the event, and to those who really went the extra mile. It really brings a huge smile to the faces of the SCS team to see how much you enjoy these events. Here are some interesting stats. By the way - the distance of in-game kilometers/miles driven as part of the event could get you from Mars to Sun and back! Pretty impressive, right? :) View the full article

A New Year brings new release plans, and we believe it's time to start talking about what we're preparing for you in 2019! We are making solid progress in learning to manage multiple projects in various stages of completion, which is very important for the future of American Truck Simulator. We usually begin talking about a new expansion when we feel that we can show enough of finished content on a regular basis to keep you updated on the work progress. That perfect time for announcing the name of a new map expansion for American Truck Simulator could be right now... but first of all, a bit of teasing. It would be too simple to reveal our newest map DLC straight away, and we know how much you love guessing! So for now, we have prepared a photo gallery of original images from an upcoming map expansion you can look forward to playing this year. Here's an appetizer, bon appétit! View the full article

We weren't sure how many of you would respond to our call, but you have amazed us once again! We have received a large number of submissions for the Beyond the Baltic Sea video contest. Our evaluation committee had a blast reviewing the entries. There were so many cool ideas there, novel camera angles, and most importantly so many cool places in the new map portrayed there, we have been impressed. So without further ado, here are the winners in no particular order - the TOP 3 entries! There were several more notable entries, but unfortunately, some of the videos had problems or drawbacks which held them back or even disqualified them from the contest. Some of the videos seemed unfinished, perhaps due to time pressure, there were really creative concepts attempted but probably things didn't end up quite as planned. In the end, we decided to mention two more videos in addition to the three winners, and award them with a "special mention" prize: We have also picked about 20 additional videos that we think are worth it to be featured on our social media channels. Even if they didn't make it all the way to the top, they are interesting to watch and must have taken a lot of time to produce. We have enjoyed watching them all. You can check them out on our official Facebook and Twitter accounts. We also received a lot of different pleas and requests that we should consider for any next video contest. It was mainly concerning the length of the video and the submission window for the contest. We'd appreciate if you'd write your feedback/pleas/requests into the comments section. What would you need/ what would make it easier or more interesting for you to enter any future contests? Big thanks to all the contest participants, we wish you all good luck next time! All winners will be notified via email. View the full article

The New Year may have only just begun but the time has come once again, to bring together the SCS On The Road crew and wake up our Sim Trailer from a deep sleep! Next stop - Broshuis Event 2019 in Kampen, Netherlands! It's going to be the 5th edition of this full public available event where visitors are able to walk along the factory and witness all the process of how the Broshuis Holland trailers are being made from the start to the very last detail. For the SCS On The Road 2019 season, we'd love to add a few events like this to our 'to visit' list. Transportation industry events organized, sponsored or run by specific companies are very interesting for us as to participate in them might open door to important contacts, start new cooperations, strengthen our current relationships with brands or establish our name among them. Those who carefully follow our Twitter and Instagram profiles surely know that we've already had a few meetings with representatives of the Broshuis B.V. company during the year of 2018. We imagine that all of this cooperation raises a lot of questions, but we don't want to spoil anything specific just yet. The message for today's article is we'd like to announce that we'll be at this event with our unique trailer along with its crew, 4D Motion Seats and a few boxes full of our own SCS merchandise to distribute as gifts to our fans! So if you're going to be somewhere around Kampen on Saturday the 12th of January - from 9.00 AM to 05.00 PM CET, make sure to stop by this event, find our spot and spend some time with us.View the full article

We are really proud that Euro Truck Simulator 2 has been nominated for this year's Steam Awards. We still remember the total surprise when the game was nominated in two categories back in 2016, and the even larger shock when it won the two awards. The competition is always massive, there are so many new great games appearing every year, and so many oldies but goldies still on people's minds. Fortunately, it's obviously also the case with ETS2, and it's truly great to see it nominated for the "Most Fun with a Machine" Award. We would like to express our sincere thanks to our fans, the nomination is a true sign of the power of the fan community! Now that the voting starts, we'll once again rely on your kind support. There are five really strong contenders in the category, but we can dream big. A somewhat funny aspect of it is that three of the games nominated for the "Most Fun with a Machine" Award have been developed in our home city - Prague, Czech Republic. Looks like there are a lot of geeks living here obsessed with developing games related to cool machines! :) Anyway, the nominations are a great start, but we are far from finished. To stand a chance, we need you to vote again. We ask all truckers, drivers, and sim enthusiasts: Vote for ETS2, together we can do it! The Voting opens December 20th, and closes January 3rd. The winners will be announced in February 2019. ETS2 is the proud holder of two Steam Awards 2016. Can we earn a third trophy? View the full article

It's that time of year again where we sit down and write down lists of presents to send to Santa. Thanks to modern technology at the North Pole, creating gifts and sending them anywhere in the world is easier than ever for Santa's team! So it is no surprise that the demand for international gift shipping is higher than ever before. With the Christmas season fast approaching, logistic companies across Europe and the US are under pressure to take on extra drivers to deliver expected gifts internationally and on-time to those eagerly awaiting them. Logistic companies across both continents are putting out the call to all drivers to aid in this huge effort to ship large amounts of holiday gifts across the USA and Europe, and to help sweeten the deal, offer bonus incentives for drivers who complete at least 12 deliveries to and from the major shipping hubs on both sides of Europe and America! It won't be an easy task, but if we work together along with some much-needed festive treats, songs and truck decorations, we can all help in bringing some much-needed aid to help deliver Christmas on time! International Gift Delivery - Rules: For personal contribution, using External Contracts, complete at least 12 deliveries to or from the major shipping hubs in either Euro Truck Simulator 2 or American Truck Simulator. Personal progress is counted in each game separately. This is also a transcontinental community event. A combined community effort within Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator. Aim for 1,000,000 deliveries to earn a special reward! [You can view community progress here] Any job with the following cargo counts towards event completion: Christmas Candy Canes Christmas Ornaments Christmas Candles Christmas Wooden Gifts Christmas Crackers Christmas Chocolates Christmas Socks Christmas Tree Lights Christmas Traditional Cookies Christmas Decorations Rewards: For your personal contribution, you will receive: Euro Truck Simulator 2: World of Trucks exclusive achievement An exclusive paint job combo for your truck & trailer - "Starlight Burst" American Truck Simulator: World of Trucks exclusive achievement An exclusive paint job combo for your truck & trailer - "Edge Tracer" When the community goal is accomplished everyone will receive: A stylish menu background for your game - "First Class" A special hanging accessory - "Magical Spiral" Bonus: If you manage to complete your personal contribution in both games (12 ETS2 + 12 ATS deliveries), you'll receive a neat, cute and special interior decoration reward to both games ;) Note: In order to qualify for the community reward, you must complete at least your personal contribution in either of the games. All in-game rewards are tradable and marketable Steam Inventory items. View the full article

Every time we release new content, a great number of community artworks appear all over the net. The best of those we have found, or those you have sent to us, were featured on our blog and social media occasionally. But it’s quite possible that there are great pieces that we and the majority of our community never saw. We thought that we would try something new with community videos. To celebrate the release of Beyond the Baltic Sea, we decided to hold a video contest with a nice little reward for the best video makers. Starting today, we invite the creative video makers in the truck sim community to create a video featuring the Beyond the Baltic Sea map expansion for Euro Truck Simulator 2 according to the specs below. The three best videos will be selected by SCS Software staff and all three winners will receive a coupon allowing them to spend 100 EUR on anything in SCS Software's Merchandise e-shop. Shipping costs will also be covered by SCS Software, to make it fair for all of our fans around the globe, as we're aware that shipping cost might cast a shadow on the excitement of winning. In the event of a really high number of participants with quality entries, we may throw in some more rewards. Also, keep in mind that your videos should be somewhat movie-like and cinematic. Normal "Let's play" videos won't do. After effects are allowed. Conditions (read carefully - you need to meet all of them): you must use the standard game & DLC only (SCS content) - using any mod will disqualify you from the contest; so only the ETS2 base game and any of our official DLCs are allowed you may use any truck & trailer combination(s). the video must be shot primarily in locations of the Beyond the Baltic Sea map expansion the form of the video is completely up to you, but remember to keep your original video file, and of course, keep any revenue if you are a semi-pro creator (see our monetization licence). all videos have to be uploaded to YouTube as a publicly available video, we'll be happy to embed the worthwhile entries into our social media feeds as they reach us to help you boost the viewer numbers. to participate you have to send the direct YouTube link together with your name / nickname to [email protected] – Subject of the email has to be "Baltic Video contest" Technical parameters: Length: 80-90 seconds (not less than 80, not more than 90) Resolution: 1920x1080 or higher 31 December 2018 22:59 UTC (23:59 CET) is the deadline - entries received after this time won't be accepted. View the full article

We are happy to release American Truck Simulator Update 1.33 out of open beta! Thanks to everyone who helped us verify the stability of the new features. We kept testing the ATS update a bit longer to make sure that there were no surprises with the new detours feature, and fortunately it looks like the reactions to it are all positive. We'll keep tweaking the feature in upcoming updates, and of course we owe it also to players of Euro Truck Simulator 2 - once we create the relevant new graphics content depicting the blocked roads. As both our flagship sims are running on the same codebase, American Truck's update benefited from the extended Experimental and Open Beta programs we have tried ahead of Euro Truck 2's new update. We are very likely to repeat the process again for most of the upcoming updates. Even when we are not currently in open beta, we'd like to invite you to provide your feedback, input, wishes, and critique on our forums. We keep monitoring the message boards pretty much every day. The old school forums often work better for a discussion thread taking place across several days or weeks, compared to the typical quick fire and forget exchanges on newer generation social media. Enjoy all the new additions and happy trucking. By the way, which changelog video do you like more? ;-) To enjoy the 1.33 update, make sure to OPT OUT of beta branches and your game will be updated automatically on Steam. CHANGELOG: Buyable turnpike double trailers (Nevada only) Detours Added OR-140 road (Oregon DLC required) Steam cloud based profiles Reusable truck and trailer configuration templates Physics improvements (suspension, damping, braking, cogs) Rain drops behavior on glass improved Music shuffling Country/ state name localization settings g_disable_beacons (0/1/2) - for people that have issue with blinking lights Various customization options MOD ALERT: Due to the number of changes, most mods will need some work to catch up! View the full article

Starting tomorrow, for the third year in a row, we will be participating in the Game Developers Session 2018 event in our home town Prague. GDS is an annual game developer conference with the longest tradition in the Czech republic, dating back to 2003. It's getting bigger and better every year, and we are happy to support it as a Silver Partner. Our own little version of GDC is two days of presentations and a small expo area to show the games. It's a great chance to have a chat with the fellow game developers from central Europe, listen to really interesting presentations from industry peers, and who knows, perhaps even hire some fresh and passionate blood. We want to show off a bit, so we are bringing to the show not just our games, but also one of our 4D motion seats, and of course SCS Software's very own On The Road crew and a bunch of additional members of our teams. Also, two of our colleagues give an invited lecture - our CEO Pavel Šebor and ATS Map Design team lead Ondřej Dufek. We're already looking forward to meeting anyone visiting the event. For those who can't make it there but would like to hear our colleagues' presentations, don't worry, everything is to be recorded and will be available online, soon. We have heard from a couple of people that you may be interested in checking out the recording of our Beyond the Baltic Sea release stream. We have it available for you below. View the full article

The Beyond the Baltic Sea map expansion for Euro Truck Simulator 2, the latest and so far largest DLC we've developed, has been out for almost a week, and we're extremely happy and honored that it's been welcomed by our games' fanbase so well. We would like to share with you some of the videos created by members of the truck sim community, reviewing the new map DLC. Squirrel's Review Daggerwin's First Look Clumsy's First Look - Entering Finland Nordrheintvplay's video (German language) Burning-Gamers.de (German language) Mark Armstrong Gaming's First Look Darwen's Creative Video ArturPL's Video (Polish language) There are dozens and dozens more, the newest member of our ETS2 family is getting a lot of attention on Youtube and Twitch. If you want to see more videos, there are more links appearing in the search results all the time: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ets2+beyond+the+baltic+sea. Meanwhile, we are working on a small patch for the game and the DLC, to address several fortunately relatively minor glitches reported by the players in the past few days. We hope to get it to you in a couple of days. View the full article

We'll be celebrating another important day for SCS Software today - the release of Euro Truck Simulator 2's large map expansion Beyond the Baltic Sea. We are counting the last hours and minutes to release. Here we go: Beyond the Baltic Sea will be published today at 18:00 UTC To shorten your wait, we plan to broadcast a live-stream from our just-established studio in SCS Software's office. It's our first experiment with streaming ourselves, so it may be a bit improvised, and the equipment and room setup is still not final, but it should be fine for today. We are looking forward to it a lot! We plan to do a couple of interviews with people from the development team, answer some of the questions that may come our way, and of course we will play the new DLC live most of the time. You can watch the stream either on our Steam developer page or on Twitch. The broadcast begins at 15:30 UTC, so don't miss it! As mentioned in the previous blog post, we will also publish three new national paint job packs bound with this expansion. It means that the players in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia will get an option to get and use their own unique graphics packs. Typically, country-specific paintjobs are purchased by the players from the given country. But we know that there are some players out there who like to collect every DLC related to our game. So we have prepared a special sweetened offer lumping together the new map DLC with the paintjob packs of all the countries in it, including Finland and Russia which have been available for some time already. You may consider checking out this bundle first before clicking any other purchase button on the Steam Store. View the full article

With the release of Beyond the Baltic Sea just around the corner, we are excited for you to explore three new countries that have not yet been featured in Euro Truck Simulator 2. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia are proud independent countries, home to many communities and industries, and we know that our truck sims have many eager fans there, too. Together with the upcoming map expansion, we have prepared national paint job packs for each of the three countries. These new paint job sets will contain traditional thematic graphics including the national flag and/or the coat of arms and other national motifs of these countries. The paint job packs will become available at the same moment we release Beyond the Baltic Sea. We're also preparing a special Steam bundle with an interesting discount covering all the countries featured in the map expansion. We wanted to give you this advanced information ahead of tomorrow's release of Beyond the Baltic Sea, as the big star "stealing the show" will be the map expansion itself. View the full article

When there was no announcement of a Beta for American Truck Simulator, some of you were worried that Euro Truck Simulator 2 is getting all the love. It's true that ETS2 acutely needed an update to enable us to release Beyond the Baltic Sea map expansion, but there is more to ATS taking a bit longer out of the gate. Let's check the story below. We are proud to bring you American Truck Simulator Update 1.33 Open Beta, packed with new features! As a counterpart to HCT trailers in Europe, ATS 1.33 brings you Turnpike double trailers (up to 100 ft). These trailers are pretty difficult to handle - in reality, they are in use only on specific roads built to meet their limitations. As of now, they are only allowed in Nevada in our game. You won't find jobs involving turnpike double trailers in freight market or quick jobs. The only way to use them is is to buy them (same as with HCT in Euro Truck 2) so that new players are not exposed to a challenge beyond their skill level. There is one unique (and temporarily exclusive) new feature in ATS 1.33 - detours. We needed some time and focus to thoroughly review it internally before a public test, and this was the very reason why we avoided doing open betas for both games at the same time. The goal of this feature is to introduce a bit of uncertainty into planning of your routes. The world in our games tends to be very predictable, while in reality the truck driver cannot take everything for granted. We wanted our players to have to improvise occasionally, and hence the concept of detours was born. From time to time you'll find the road ahead of you blocked, maybe with state police waving you to go a different way, forcing you to remap your route. Or to search your memory for another option to reach your destination if you're so hardcore that you do not use the GPS. There'll always be a guaranteed way to deliver your cargo. But sometimes it can take more time than you'd be comfortable with, or move you away from the gas stations where you planned to refuel and get some rest. Detours are adding some adrenaline to the driver's job. Think of this addition as "phase one" and please do give us your feedback. We hope that you will appreciate our ambition to spice up the universe of our games to make it feel more alive and dynamic. For those of you hungry for new tarmac, we've added the first segment of OR-140. It remained on our wish-list for Oregon, and we are now catching up. We know how important this road is (trucking-wise) and its significance as "a shortcut", allowing you to avoid the long way around via US-20, or through California. The section we open today connects Lakeview and Klamath, a future extension we are also considering should reach to Nevada. The list of changes continues with the features that we have introduced in ETS2 1.33 already. You may have spotted them outlined in our 1.33 update video. Steam cloud-based profiles have received very positive reaction. Saving the game to a "cloud" can prevent potential loss of your profile due to a computer malfuction, or when changing your machine. It will also allow you to play on multiple computers without the need to carry a flash drive with you. Reusable truck and trailer configuration templates also received a pretty warm welcome, as the life of a big fleet manager became much easier. We have some ideas to take the feature even further in the future, but we believe it's going to be a great time-saver for many players in its current form already. Minor changes include improved rain drop behavior on the windshield, music shuffling and localization for names of states (countries). For people having issues with blinking lights, we've added a new cvar. Try different settings with writing g_disable_beacons 0/ 1/ 2 in the console. We hope that one of these will suit you well. So enjoy all the new additions, but please remember: It's only an open beta, not a stable public version - so you may encounter bugs, instability, and kinks. It's completely okay if you want to wait for the final release. But if you're interested in helping us to move there faster, we'll appreciate all of your feedback on our forum and your bug reports in this section. If you wish to participate in the open beta, you can find this version in the public_beta branch on Steam. The way to access it is as follows: Steam client → LIBRARY → right click on American Truck Simulator → Properties → Betas tab → public_beta → 1.33 public beta. No password required. CHANGELOG: Buyable turnpike double trailers (Nevada only) Detours Added OR-140 road (Oregon DLC required) Steam cloud based profiles Reusable truck and trailer configuration templates Physics improvements (suspension, damping, braking, cogs) Rain drops behavior on glass improved Music shuffling Country/ state name localization settings g_disable_beacons (0/1/2) - for people that have issue with blinking lights MOD ALERT: Due to the number of changes, most mods will need some work to catch up! View the full article

You're probably used by now to SCS bringing a new game update just ahead of a major DLC release. This time is no different. We need to add support for new features specific for the new DLC content, but we also take the opportunity to add new gameplay and technical features that every player of the game will enjoy. We've decided to do a little trial and released an Experimental Beta prior to the Public Beta. It proved us right with putting our trust into you, our amazing community – The Experimental Beta, or rather your bug reports and general feedback, helped us a great deal in getting to the stable Public Beta, and eventually to the full 1.33 update faster than anticipated. A huge thank you to all who participated in helping us to pinpoint all the problems the Beta builds had. This was one of the smoothest Betas we’ve ever had, which is interesting, considering the number of new features. So enjoy all the new additions - including our first update video! We hope you'll like it! To enjoy the 1.33 update, make sure to OPT OUT of beta branches and your game will be automatically updated on Steam. CHANGELOG: Buyable HCT (High Capacity Transport) double trailers (Finland only, Beyond the Baltic Sea DLC required) Buyable double flatbed trailers (Scandinavia DLC required) Buyable container and brick trailers (flatbed variants) and cargo market Buyable Krone Boxliner (Krone DLC required) Steam cloud based profiles Reusable truck and trailer configuration templates Physics improvements (suspension, damping, braking, COGs) Rain drops behavior on glass improved Music shuffling Country and city name localization settings g_disable_beacons (0/ 1/ 2) - for people having issues with blinking lights (watch the video) Two new port cities added - Kapellskär in Sweden and Travemünde in Germany (read more) MOD ALERT: Due to the number of changes, most mods will need some work to catch up! View the full article