I became a racing game aficionado at age five playing Lego Racers on my great grandfather’s Windows 95 Gateway PC. And I’ve been a car enthusiast since my days careening the Subaru Impreza Rally Car ’99 into walls on the dirt stages of Gran Turismo 2. But sim racing never quite did it for me, and that’s become a problem, because sims have largely supplanted mainstream racing games.
Bored during the pandemic and flush with cash after being laid off from my food service job, I bought a Thrustmaster T150 RS—an entry-level rig with a wheel, three-pedal box, and manual shifter (the third pedal and gearbox were extra). I drove my favorite tuner cars in Forza Horizon 4 and tried to make “realistic” driving videos like those viral guys on YouTube do with their thousand-dollar rigs. In sim racing, the sky’s the limit; the logical conclusion of the genre is a hardware setup that reproduces every microscopic vibration of your in-game car via high-tech hardware like force-feedback steering wheels and haptic seating.
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It was fun, but it never quite stuck. Why? Maybe because my setup, despite being $300—a lot of money for a “casual” gamer to spend on what is, at the end of the day, a controller—provided an at best middling facsimile of the real experience of driving. The T150 RS actually has decent force feedback, but without spending another $2,000 at least on a basic FFB/haptic feedback sim seat setup, the rest of the experience felt about as akin to real-world driving as playing Gran Turismo on a DualShock gamepad.
But as sim racing player counts have grown by over 1000% in the last 10 years, the mainstream racing genre has slowly whittled down to a single, albeit highly successful, franchise. The number of releases in the sim space versus the arcade one suggest that sims have basically replaced the historically prolific arcade/simcade genre.
As Reddit user mido_sama mused in response to an article highlighting Forza Horizon 6’s massive sales figures, “It has no competition”.
Redditor fvgh12345 responded, “the state of racing and driving games is kinda sad. There was so much variety in the PS2 era, some of my all time favorite games. Would be cool if games or successors of games like Midnight Club, Flat Out, Twisted Metal, Driver, and Vigilante made a return.”
Recently, PC Gamer’s Wes Fenlon previewed the upcoming simcade racer Clutch, and found it just a bit too sim-focused for what otherwise could have been solid open-world-racing competition to Forza Horizon.
Is sim racing a one-to-one substitute for the old Need for Speed and Burnout blockbusters? Sure, true simulation racers like iRacing and rFactor have sold pretty well for non-mainstream entries. But even the bestselling sim franchise Assetto Corsa has barely beat out sales of Midnight Club—a series that existed for fewer than 10 years in the 2000s, before gaming even hit the mainstream—and has shipped an order of magnitude fewer copies than the Need For Speed catalogue.
My point is: sims may be on the up-and-up, but their rise has accompanied a loss of hundreds of millions of gamers who once flocked to the many now-dead arcade racing franchises. The racing genre writ large has, for whatever reason, simply become more inaccessible and less popular to the everyman.
Meanwhile, real-world racing as a motorsport has become more accessible than ever. In a market where traditional sports executives seem hellbent on hiding their broadcasts behind as many byzantine subscription services as possible, motorsport has gone against the grain. A non-car-enthusiast friend of mine recently told me that he’s gotten into F1 and Indycar primarily because it’s the only major sport with live events he can follow without jumping through a bunch of expensive hoops.
Remember the good old days when you could afford rent catch a ball game with your mates on the cheap? Or, for a gaming analogy, the halcyon years when you, a casual player, could pick up one of 10 mainstream racers on the market and hop on the couch to lay down some laps on a $10 MadCatz controller you found in the bargain bin at GameCrazy?
As motorsport grows more popular, sim racing becomes a cheaper way own a racecar—rather than a more expensive way to play a videogame.
But the expensive simulation hobby has quickly exploded from a niche one for the sweatiest among us to a cool yuppie nightclub activity in cities from Las Vegas to Madrid. Now, the world’s largest sim racing trade fair has landed on US shores for the first time, as I covered in the article linked above. I had a theory about why that is.
I talked to Mark Puc—representative of the “OG of sim racing” (his words, but it’s true) company Fanatec at SimRacing Expo 2026—about his industry insights. As did everyone at the Expo I interviewed, Puc chalked up the growth in part to Netflix’s Formula 1 documentary Drive to Survive. And as motorsport grows more popular, sim racing becomes a cheaper way own a racecar—rather than a more expensive way to play a videogame.
Puc noted, “the correlation between sim racing and real racing is very analog, so one supports the other. And right now, there’s a lot of people starting sim racing that are going to end up racing real cars”.
Puc also highlighted Jimmy Broadbent and my own personal favorite sim racing YouTuber Steve Alvarez Brown, alias Super GT—both of whom are sponsored by Fanatec and both of whom went from sim racing on at-home rigs to professional motorsports. Broadbent, who has over 1 million YouTube subscribers, started off vlogging from a shed and now races in the Nürburgring Langstrecken-Serie sponsored by the motorsports suspension component manufacturer Bilstein. Alvarez Brown, also a driver for Bilstein, now drives GT4 race cars on the ‘Ring.
For many, games are a pipeline to future passions. As a child, I spent interminable hours in historical strategy games like Age of Empires, and I now have three degrees in imperial and international history. However, while arcade driving games like Need for Speed, Burnout, and the inimitable Rush 2: Extreme Racing USA prepped me for car enthusiasm as an adult, they did not land me in actual motorsports.
Maybe that’s okay. Maybe old-fashioned car games are dying not because of the sim industry, but because real-world car enthusiasm is in free-fall. Maybe sim racers are not less accessible videogames but rather more accessible motorsports, in a world where professional racing has somehow taken off among young people even while their driver’s license possession has cratered and, as mentioned above, the rest of car culture is struggling. Maybe a $1,000 sim rig isn’t displacing a $10 Play Station controller, but rather a substitute for a $10,000 track-modified Mazda Miata or a $15 million Formula 1 car.
It could be a good thing that enthusiast car culture is slowly dying. But meanwhile, motorsport thrives. I, for one, can always go back to 20-year-old Gran Turismo games and simply accept that sim racing isn’t for me. But maybe one day on a lark, I’ll download Assetto Corsa, plug in my Thrustmaster T150 RS, and be grateful that the virtual world has kept alive my dream of cruising the Tokyo Expressway in a Dodge Durango SRT Hellcat.
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