These Are The Biggest Racing Games Still On The Way In 2025
If you're a racing game player, you've been eating insanely good so far in 2025. Kunos kicked the year off, giving PC early access to the long-awaited "Assetto Corsa Evo." Later on, titles like "Wreckfest 2" and "Tokyo Extreme Racer" made it to PC in early access as well. Xbox players got to celebrate "Forza's" 20th birthday with a major update to Forza Motorsport franchise, bringing back the legendary Fujimi Kaido. Speaking of "Forza," PlayStation players got a taste of Microsoft's franchise for the first time ever when "Forza Horizon 5" dropped on PS5 in April 2025.
Even Nintendo players have been fed, with "Mario Kart World" launching as the first brand-new entry to the franchise in over a decade. Again, good eating, but we hope you've saved your appetite, because the feast is far from over this year. From charming indie drops to major-studio simulators, and the first NASCAR game in nearly four years — here's what's still on deck for racing games in 2025.
iRacing Arcade
The Folks at iRacing have been trying a lot of new things in the past two years. From developing off-road racer "ExoCross" to working on the upcoming NASCAR title, the team has been hoping to expand its brand, producing more accessible and approachable titles. That's why in July 2024, the company backed Original Fire Games, promising to bring a title similar to the Vancouver-based studio's popular "Circuit Superstars" and "Karting Superstars." Then, over a year later, iRacing Studios finally broke the silence, with the game's teaser releasing this past August: meet iRacing Arcade.
In the 20-second teaser, iRacing and Original Fire don't show us much, but from a first glance, it absolutely holds the look and feel of the past two Superstars releases. But with licensed cars and tracks, like Porsche's 911 GT3 Cup car being shown at Imola and Autodromo Hermanos Rodríguez, this looks to be the officially licensed version of the overhead racer that fans have been hoping for.
NASCAR 25
What do you get when the guy who did NR2003 and iRacing grabs the folks who did the NASCAR Heat series? The potential to make one of the best mainline NASCAR games in decades. NASCAR fans haven't been treated to a console title since the horror show that was "NASCAR 21: Ignition."
Four years later, iRacing Studios is ending the drought with the highly anticipated "NASCAR 25." The announcement that iRacing would be taking the reins from Motorsport Games to make the next multi-platform release instantly got the hypetrain going in the sim racing community. Diehards knew that iRacing CEO Dave Kaemmer is no stranger to offline games, and is the mastermind behind iconic old-school racers like "Grand Prix Legends" and "NASCAR Racing 2003 Season." And after acquiring NASCAR Heat, Monster Games, you can rest assured this is far from an "iRacing" console ship.
iRacing Studios has promised a "robust career" mode, where players will be able to work their way up from the ARCA Menards Series all the way up to the pinnacle of the Cup Series. Starring 190 real-life drivers across the four series, the game is going to have over 400 unique paint schemes. Combine this with online lobbies hosting up to 40 Cup Series cars, and this game has the potential to easily be one of the most well-rounded releases the series has had in years. We haven't gotten a confirmation for Steam quite yet, but console players will be able to go racing on October 14.
RENNSPORT
It's been a comically slow burn in the past few years for Teyon Game's sim title "RENNSPORT." Conceived as an esports-first sim to challenge the likes of iRacing, the game was first announced in 2022 before the launch of its closed beta in 2023. A lot has happened since then. RFactor 2's developers at Studio 397 claimed that Teyon stole code for their game, and in ESL's R1 tournament, simracers won over $500,000 playing a game not available to the mass public. It's been a rocky road, but when the game's open beta was released last year, free to play, fans still saw an incredibly solid and realistic platform for GT and prototype racing.
An announcement this year moving the game to a boxed pricing model also put out much of the game's fires, getting rid of the in-game currency and battle passes coming at launch. Even bigger, however, was the announcement that Xbox and PlayStation would be getting the game as well, with full cross-play and cross-progression between all platforms — something unseen in the Simracing world.
For esports diehards and league runners, this alone could be the silver bullet for the game. Console players have had access to Sim titles like "Assetto Corsa" and "Assetto Corsa Competizione," but have never been able to play alongside their friends on PC. This alone could motivate racers and leagues to adopt it when it releases later this year.
Super Woden Rally Edge
It's hard to think of a more underrated racing game out there than "Super Woden GP". Spanish solo-creator ViJuDa combined the top-down action of arcade titles throughout the '90s with a career mode, UI, and soundtrack mimicking Gran Turismo to make a masterstroke of retro racing nostalgia. Its latest work, "Super Woden Rally Edge," aims to bring that level of nostalgia from the circuits to the rally stages. Players will be able to drive across eight locations in over 80 cars. While the cars are all unlicensed, they'll certainly remain recognizable to rally and Gran Turismo fans alike, ranging from modest '60s hatchbacks to '90s hillclimb monsters.
Readers who have played Funselektor's "Art of Rally" will feel right at home with the game's top-down gameplay (which will get a chase camera for the first time!). However, ViJuDa promises an in-depth career mode, where players compete for money to buy, upgrade, and customize their cars. There hasn't been an official release date yet, but Rally Edge stays on target for a PC version by the end of 2025.
Project Motor Racing
Console players have been starved for true sim titles for a long time. While the "Forza" and "Gran Turismo" series reign supreme in sales, diehard simracers yearn for the next racer that drops the "cade" from these mainline "simcades". Ian Bell's Project CARS Series helped fuel that desire for five years. The legendary developer's crowdfunded sim series went through three games with over a million copies sold, but saw its end after the third edition of the series in 2020 lost its way. To use Bell's work, think less "GTR" and more "Need for Speed: Shift."
That spill made Bell hit the reset button and create a brand-new team, Straight Four Studios. Made up of a large chunk of developers from the legendary GTR2, Bell's brought the band back together with one goal: to create a true follow-up to the GTR series. Originally known as "GTRevival," the studio struck a deal with "Farm Simulator's" publishers at GIANTS Software, and ended up with a brand-new name: "Project Motor Racing." All this to say, Bell and his team have learned a lot in the past five years, but what can we expect from PMS — a fourth Project CARS or a third GTR?
It certainly feels like the latter, and in the best way possible. With 27 track layouts across all five continents, "Project Motor Racing" will have over 70 GT and Prototype racers on tap, ranging from the legends of the '60s, all the way up to the Le Mans hypercars of today, with all the Group C and GT1 goodness in between. If you're a fan of endurance racing or just sim racing on consoles, you're going to want to check this out when "Project Motor Racing" fully releases on November 25.
over the hill
We end this list with a hard pivot from the high-fidelity sims and blood-pumping arcade games on the way, because Funselektor and Strelka games promise to bring yet another gorgeous racing game by year's end: "over the hill." Set in various biomes and terrains, you and three of your bravest friends get to overland in classic off-roaders, tackling different objectives and exploring the open wilderness. Players will be able to discover and unlock new vehicles, upgrades, and customizations for their trucks, and can even find portals to new areas of the game's colossal map.
As mentioned before, the game is made by Canadian studio Funselektor, who's already brought us phenomenal titles like "Absolute Drift," "Golden Lap," and "Art of Rally." Those of you who are familiar with Funselektor's art style will feel right at home with Dune Casu's minimal but majestic art style. Very rarely do we describe a video game as "Cozy," but with scenes like this, how the heck can you not? While no specific date has been given, "over the hill" is set for release before the end of the year, with a console release on the way soon after. If you love driving games but need something to lower the blood pressure, it's absolutely worth a look.
