IndyCar will finally have its own dedicated video game in 2023

The middle of the game was not particularly favorable for American open wheel racing. You have to go back almost 20 years to the last time IndyCar got its own dedicated title. We’ve received Formula 1 games every year without fail, but IndyCar hasn’t garnered the same kind of attention from the developers. This will soon change.

Motorsport Games announced a partnership with IndyCar on Thursday, hoping to launch its first fully licensed game in 2023. At the moment, the only way to drive these cars in a virtual setting is to Forza Motorsport, Project Cars 3 or iRacing.

These three games feature Dallara’s specific chassis, but they are not meant to recreate the entire season, with all teams, drivers and circuits. Simulation quality aside, by replicating all of these elements, Motorsport Games’ efforts should be the most trusted IndyCar digital product for a very long time.

Before that you had IndyCar Series as of 2004, developed by Brain In A Jar, published by Codemasters and released in the middle of “The split. “As for the CART side of things, Sega Flag to Flag launched alongside the Dreamcast in 1999, and the following year brought us the incomparable CART Fury. And boy, was CART Fury something special. Watch this masterpiece for a minute:

It’s almost like the game equivalent of Pushed. Which is ironic, because Pushed has its own game which somehow was not licensed by CART, although the CART crews and drivers were plastered throughout the film itself. The early 2000s were a really weird time for tie-ins, and an even stranger time for American open-wheel racing.

In short, back to the present. I asked a representative from Motorsport Games which development team will be leading the new IndyCar game, and he told me that the information could not yet be released. Motorsport Games is home to a number of studios, including NASCAR Heat developer 704Games and rFactor Manufacturer Studio 397. An IndyCar game with Studio 397 seems like a perfect match, but we’ll just have to wonder for now.

So that’s all good news, and I’m sure it will excite IndyCar fans who have waited centuries for a game to authentically capture a series that, let’s be honest with ourselves, is far more exciting to watch than F1 on a regular basis. It’s just.

the not so good news is that as part of the deal, Motorsport Games will also inherit “exclusive esports rights”. These rights “could start as early as this year”. Having seen the way Motorsport Games has recently made it very difficult for iRacing to organize a 24 Hours of Le Mans type event, I imagine that the iRacers who prefer to drive the IndyCar in this simulation will be skeptical of this news. They have every right to be.

Of course, there is a lot that we don’t know yet. But iRacing has cultivated a consistent and rewarding platform for precise simulation races that many people have flocked to over the years. At the moment, there is no reason to believe that a new game developed by another team could deliver a similar quality experience. That in itself wouldn’t be a problem, if it didn’t become the only game in town.

It may not be. Motorsport Games has been strangely cooperative with its management of the NASCAR license, allowing eNASCAR iRacing series to coexist alongside its more focused and more casual series Heat series. If this IndyCar partnership goes in the same smooth way, everyone will benefit. If not, you can add it to the long list of sports exclusive deals that shareholders love and fans hate.