Sales of the F1 series are slumping horribly, Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown just launched to dismal reviews, and Forza Motorsport has been out for a year and no one really noticed it. Are racing games dying?
Racing games used to be how console manufacturers would show off. Every new Xbox and PlayStation would launch with an exclusive racing game that displayed just how far graphics and performance had come. And they were huge. Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport were titanic franchises.
Racing games used to be cultural moments. Need for Speed dominated the early 2000s and helped to build the Fast & Furious franchise. Combat games like Twisted Metal and arcade titles like Burnout were massive.
All of that is no more.
Lack of innovation
There is only so far you can go with racing games. Driving a car around a track or city can only really change in a few ways. Every game had its quirks with NFS doing police chases and Burnout favoring wrecks, while Forza and Gran Turismo had tuning and AI track racing. But eventually, that gets old.
There's not been a true evolution to a casual racing game since Grand Theft Auto left its top-down world and let the player leave the car with GTA 3. Since then driving has become a smaller and smaller part of the game while its popularity has exploded.
Under its skin, the core gameplay loop of NFS Unbound is the same as it was 20 years ago with NFS Underground 2, it just lost its novelty, and with it its popularity and cultural relevance.
New players are not flocking to racing games because they've basically played them before. Most players can only drive so many cars around Spa, Monza, or a generic city before getting bored.
While sports games like FIFA & Madden innovated with Ultimate Team to keep sales (and revenue) high and the battle royale mode revitalized shooters, racing games have not innovated, and as a result have concentrated players in just a few small spaces of the genre.
The polarization of racing
These days there are really only two types of successful racing games: Ultra-realistic simulators or family-friendly casual titles. Both these areas are dominated by goliaths that leave little space for new games.
iRacing and Assetto Corsa dominate the sim world. These games push realism in tyre simulation handling, and track representation and have deeply loyal player bases.
iRacing will regularly have 10,000+ players online, all paying a monthly subscription + one-off DLC purchases for tracks and cars. Assetto Corsa Competizione has a reliable 4-5,000 players on Steam every day and a thriving community of league racing.
But new players face a massive barrier to entry with these games. To make the most of these games you need a wheel and pedal setup, not a controller. To have that you need space and a few hundred pounds. Of course that's just a basic setup. A direct drive wheelbase and a rigid cockpit are needed to truly experience what these platforms have to offer. That's even more money and even more space. Oh and don't forget the PC to play it on.
You don't need a Max Verstappen style $35,000 set up, but if you really want to dive into sim racing then $2-3,000 for a PC and decent wheel setup is the minimum.
These games are successful and have cornered players with sunk costs to the point where new games such as Le Mans Ultimate and Rennsport struggle to get a look in. They also focus on competitive PvP. If you want a career mode against AI drivers or just a casual race then you'll have to look elsewhere.
On the other end of the spectrum are the arcade giants of Mario Kart and Forza Horizon.
The latest Mario Kart game, 8 Deluxe, is now seven years old but is still a regular best-seller thanks to the Switch's position as a family-friendly entry-level console and the fact that Mario Kart is very much a game for all ages with the nostalgia hit for adults and a super-satisfying gameplay loop that many have tried and failed to replicate.
Then there is Forza Horizon. The Game Pass audience helps Microsoft's popular open-world game, but its forgiving handling and total lack of grind for the fastest cars is extremely welcoming for all skill levels. The Horizon series throws cars and prizes at players and has a map that is fun to explore and well laid out with outlandish jumps and a rewind system that lets you undo mistakes.
These two dominate the casual scene these days, with little space left for new games or even the legacy franchises. Need For Speed doesn't get a look in anymore. New IPs like Disney Speedstorm are quickly forgotten.
The tricky middle
In between these polar opposites is where the sweet spot for racing games used to be. And where the sim-cade titles like Forza Motorsport, Gran Turismo, and F1 try to carve out a living.
The Gran Turismo series is still a success and a genuine console seller for Sony, but it has gone away from its single-player roots and is trying to push its way into the competitive esports/PvP space. While not as sim-focuses as iRacing or ACC it clearly wants to be taken seriously in that regard.
Meanwhile, Forza Motorsport has been a disaster for Turn 10 and Microsoft. It's been out for a year and has made little impact with a dull single-player experience and odd on-track feel. The latest F1 game, F1 24, is sitting at around 25% of the player count that the franchise had four years ago.
Stagnation hits hardest with these games as they try to appeal to a broad audience. They can't go too far down the simulation road or they lose all of the controller players, but they are also stuck with the same tracks and largely the same cars every time they release a game.
The failure to adapt to ground effect regulations in F1 or innovate the career mode has seen players leave the Codemasters series in droves. Either for those sim titles to get a better on-track experience or just depart the genre entirely.
Can racing games make a comeback?
A return to the 2000s glory days of racing games seems unlikely. Outside of Mario Kart 9 or Gran Turismo 8 there isn't much hope for a huge cultural wave of excitement in the broader gaming world.
Games are getting more and more expensive to make, and that seems to go double for racing games. Licensing car models, building tracks and environments, developing better physics, and greater graphical fidelity to show off hardware all costs an obscene amount. Meanwhile, the returns for racing games are vanishingly small.
New games have to compete against established giants for a smaller audience and less revenue than in other genres. No racing game has been able to truly harness a battle pass or micro-transactions. DLC purchases and iRacing's membership system are the closest things to continuous cashflow racing games have. That pales in comparison to what a successful shooter or MMO can bring in.
Racing games are well and truly a niche in 2024, and one that is crystalizing into a few behemoths with a vanishingly small space for others. Innovation is thin on the ground, and new players are hard to come by. Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown is just the latest example of how hard it is to launch a successful racing game these days.
The genre isn't dead, but it will never be what it once was.