- Primary Subject: World Rally Championship video game license, 2001 to 2032
- Key Update: The official WRC game license has passed through five holders since 2001, most recently returning to Nacon for the 2027 to 2032 seasons after Electronic Arts abandoned it two years early.
- Status: Evergreen
- Last Verified: September 17, 2026
- Quick Answer: Sony, Black Bean, Bigben, Codemasters, and Nacon again have held the official World Rally Championship game license since 2001. Nacon holds it through 2032.
No official World Rally Championship game covers the 2025 season, and none will cover 2026 either.
On April 30, 2025, Codemasters published a development update that read, in part, "Every great journey eventually finds its finish line, and today, we announce that we've reached the end of the road working on WRC."
Electronic Arts had held the license for one released game and two content seasons. Twenty-six days later, WRC Promoter announced the rights were going back to Nacon, the French publisher that had lost them in the first place.
Five regimes have held the official WRC game license since 2001. Nacon is the only one to get it twice, and four of the five ended early, ended badly, or both.
Sony bought five years of exclusivity and then lost interest
Sony Computer Entertainment Europe took the first FIA-licensed console deal and handed development to Evolution Studios in Runcorn.
World Rally Championship arrived in Europe on November 30, 2001, PlayStation 2 exclusive, and four annual sequels followed through WRC: Rally Evolved in October 2005.
The exclusivity covered the 2001 to 2005 seasons and nothing beyond them.
A championship license does not include drivers. Colin McRae had his own series at Codemasters, so Sony could not use his name, and WRC II Extreme put François Duval in the slot instead.
The problem of licensing the sport separately from the people and cars competing in it has never gone away.
When the deal lapsed, Evolution moved to MotorStorm, was bought outright by Sony in 2007, made Driveclub, and was closed in March 2016. Part of that team joined Codemasters weeks later.
The license itself sat unclaimed for four years, with no console WRC game between Rally Evolved and 2010.
Milestone got four years and only used three of them
Italian label Black Bean Games signed a four-year deal in 2009 and gave development to Milan studio Milestone.
The first game was announced at the WRC season launch in Paris on February 3, 2010, and shipped on October 8 that year for PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. WRC 2 followed in 2011, and WRC 3 in 2012.
WRC 4 arrived on October 25, 2013, with Milestone still developing and Bigben Interactive on the box. The publisher had already changed underneath the developer. Reviews across the run were middling, with the physics a recurring complaint.
Milestone moved on to MotoGP and MXGP, then made Sébastien Loeb Rally Evo in January 2016, a rally game organized around one driver's career because the championship was no longer available to it.
Bigben held it the longest and got better the entire time
Bigben signed with WRC Promoter GmbH in July 2013 and moved console development to Kylotonn in Paris, working under the KT Racing label.
Seven games came out of that arrangement, from WRC 5 on October 13, 2015 through WRC Generations in late 2022. The one gap year was 2018, when Kylotonn shipped V-Rally 4 instead.
Bigben owned all of Kylotonn by 2018 and renamed its publishing arm Nacon in 2020.
WRC 5 through 7 were rough, and WRC 8 in September 2019 is where the series turned, rebuilding the career mode into something closer to what Codemasters had been doing with Formula One.
In March 2020, the studio announced WRC 9, 10, and 11. The eleventh never existed. By the time it was announced, the license had been sold out from under it.
Codemasters won the license a year before Electronic Arts owned Codemasters
On June 1, 2020, Codemasters announced a five-year exclusive deal covering the 2023 through 2027 seasons across console, PC, and mobile.
Electronic Arts agreed to acquire the company later that year at an enterprise value of around 1.2 billion dollars and closed in early 2021, so the game arrived as EA Sports WRC on November 3, 2023.
It was built in Unreal Engine 4 rather than the in-house EGO engine, a first for the studio, and reviewed at roughly 80 on Metacritic.
Critics liked the handling and the volume of stages and spent most of their complaints on shader stutter and frame rate. There was no sequel.
The 2024 season ran as paid content packs, the last being Hard Chargers, and then came the April 2025 statement and the breakup of the Southam driving team. Electronic Arts walked away two full seasons before its contract was due to expire.
Worth noting, because the assumption is tempting: the consortium buyout of Electronic Arts by the Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners was not announced until September 29, 2025, five months after the WRC exit.
The FIA has not been the one selling this since 1996
The FIA owns the trademark and writes the rules. The commercial rights have been out on contract for nearly thirty years, starting with Bernie Ecclestone's International Sportsworld Communicators.
David Richards and Prodrive bought that business in 2000, North One Sport bought it in 2007 on a promoter contract running from 2010, and the whole thing collapsed when its Russian-backed parent went under, with administration in 2011 and Eurosport covering the 2012 season.
WRC Promoter GmbH, formed as a Red Bull Media House joint venture, has held the rights since 2013 and has signed every game deal since Bigben's. It changed hands too.
The FIA announced on July 31, 2026, that WRC Promoter had been sold to Cosmobilis, run by former Formula One team principal Éric Boullier, alongside Park Square Capital.
It had been on the market since August 2024 at an asking price of around 550 million dollars. No game license fee has ever been disclosed in any era of this, by anyone.
Nacon is the only company to get it twice
The return was announced on May 26, 2025: exclusive PC and console rights for six seasons, 2027 through 2032.
Nacon chief executive Alain Falc called the license "an exceptional playground to build a highly refined driving experience," and WRC Promoter described the plan as a complete reboot rather than a continuation of the KT Racing games.
The timing lines up with the 2027 regulations the World Motor Sport Council approved on December 11, 2025, which put spaceframe cars on Rally2 mechanicals at around 300 horsepower under a 345,000 euro cost cap.
So the next official WRC game launches into a car generation nobody has driven yet, under rules eighteen months old, sold by a promoter that changed owners two seasons before release.
Six seasons is the longest term anybody has been given since Sony. Nothing about this license has ever been stable except the fact that somebody always wants it.
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