demontrace: All I can say to the people who ask would you even want to use a racing wheel in these games, and there are a lot of these people, is that if you haven't tried a wheel in these racing games, it's a completely different experience, and with the force feedback, you can really have moments of suspension of disbelief. I mean if controllers with thumbstick controls were truly better than steering wheels for driving, don't you think our cars would have a different setup by now?
I actually do own one steering wheel/pedals setup, bought it a long time ago as it was supposed to offer crossplatform support, working both with PC games (like Grand Prix Legends) and Playstation games (like the Gran Turismo games)...
...but in the end I didn't really use it all, it just felt too much work to set it up either with my PC or the Playstation when I wanted to play a driving game.
Steering wheel/pedals are more authentic of course, but whether they are better... well, I e.g. recall an old discussion on some racing simulator discussion forum where one avid Grand Prix Legends player opened up how stunned and dismayed he was to learn that when he once just happened to switch from his trusty steering wheel/pedals to play with an analog PC joystick... he beat pretty much all his own records in the game. He was dismayed to find out that using a proper steering wheel with racing simulators seemed actually a hindrance.
The reason cars don't have an analog joystick or a gamepad instead of pedals and steering wheels... I guess it is because how cars have historically been built (all the transmission, with or without steering assist etc.), and just a few decades ago it would have probably been too expensive to build the car controls to be completely "digital", ie. that the system is completely detached physically from the steering wheel and pedals.
Also, it may be that an analog joystick or gamepad gives an edge in extreme racing situations (like moving the steering from one maximum to another in milliseconds etc.) that is probably less useful in everyday driving where you don't drive with the pedal to the metal or make sudden moves all the time, and can load a save game and retry if you make an error and crash fatally.
That reminds me though that I might have seen some articles of experiments for wildly different car steering systems... but I guess the world wouldn't just be ready for them, no car company would take a risk of offering a car with a wildly different steering system than what people are used to for decades. It probably wouldn't even be legal in most countries, considering how people are taught to drive in driving schools etc.
