How Popular Are Our Favourite PC Racing Sims?

Most Popular Racing Sims 01.jpg
Racing simulators tend to have more longevity than most sports games, but how many people are still playing some of the bigger titles?

Using SteamDB, we can get a reasonably accurate gauge of how many people are currently playing a particular game through Steam. Below I’ve noted the all-time peak concurrent players for some of the more popular titles here at RaceDepartment, plus the 24 hour peak as taken on November 23rd, 2021.

NOTES: SteamDB of course excludes console players and those who might be using an alternative launch method such as Epic. There is also some level of error both in the statistics gathering, and the times when the data was collected. So, please don’t treat the figures below as an absolute value of how many people are playing the title, but rather an overall barometer of how many people are enjoying it on Steam. iRacing statistics are harder to come by, but I will add a footnote if I can gather an accurate player count.

Assetto Corsa
  • All Time Peak – 11,691
  • 24 Hour Peak – 6,824
This modding monster continues to enjoy success eight years after it was first released to the public, thanks in no small part to the great community of creators that keeps AC relevant with new and classic cars and tracks, plus the latest skins of our favourite drivers and teams.

Assetto Corsa Competizione
  • All Time Peak – 6,926
  • 24 Hour Peak – 3,959
The official SRO simulator has been another success for Kunos. On the eve of the release of another major update, thousands of players are still enjoying this GT sim two and a half years after its release on Steam.

Automobilista 2
  • All Time Peak – 1,150
  • 24 Hour Peak – 372
Reiza Studios are hard at work on their biggest physics update so far for AMS2, which is set to be released to the public this month. The title has had its share of doubters, but Reiza has kept its ear to the ground in the sim community and has made major strides since the first release version and will hope to see the number of people enjoying the title continue to climb.

BeamNG.drive
  • All Time Peak – 13,572
  • 24 Hour Peak – 7,932
Known mainly to the layperson as a crash simulator, BeamNG is perhaps better summarized as a physics playground with a huge modding community. This simulator has more players than even Assetto Corsa, and likely owes much of that popularity to the huge selection of car and track mods on offer, much like AC.

F1 2021
  • All Time Peak – 24,513
  • 24 Hour Peak – 11,400
The official game of F1 has enjoyed mostly positive reviews once again this year. And unlike recent years, updates to the title have included new content. Three additional tracks have been added post-release, which seems to be having the effect of sustaining the interest of players, as over 10,000 people on Steam alone are still enjoying playing F1 at any time.

Euro Truck Simulator 2
  • All Time Peak – 61,081
  • 24 Hour Peak – 37,635
This is obviously not a racing sim, but for perspective on the other titles, check out the impressive numbers behind ETS2. Apparently the allure of a chill drive across some of the most beautiful areas on the continent of Europe holds great appeal to gamers.

Most Popular Racing Sims 03.jpg

Forza Horizon 5
  • All Time Peak – 81,096
  • 24 Hour Peak – 37,924
Forza Horizon 5 has broken every sales record for a racing game, and even ignoring the massive player base on console, the concurrent player count is staggering. FH5 continues the series’ open world, consequence free feel, and appeals to the fun-chasing side in racing game fans.

NASCAR 21: Ignition
  • All Time Peak – 323
  • 24 Hour Peak – 42
NASCAR 21’s launch was marred by bugs and bad reviews. As such, the game is off to a slow start. This is the newest title on this list, and should be enjoying its “honeymoon” sales phase, but most of the major complaints about the title have yet to be addressed. The good news? It’s now playable for me since the latest update, so my overdue review should be coming soon.

RaceRoom Racing Experience
  • All Time Peak – 2,630
  • 24 Hour Peak – 1,057
There’s a case to be made that RaceRoom is the most complete racing sim on the market. As such, its popularity has remained strong since its early 2013 release. Content releases have slowed recently, but a well-built multiplayer system keeps players coming back.

rFactor 2
  • All Time Peak – 1,652
  • 24 Hour Peak – 747
rFactor 2 has been praised since its 2015 Steam release as the pinnacle of simulator force feedback and vehicle physics. Either opinion is debatable of course, but there’s no doubt that the driving experience in rF2 can be a pure pleasure. The title is also the preferred sim of many major eSports series, which keeps it relevant and popular with both casual and professional players.

Obviously there are countless other titles that could have been included in this article, so if I missed any titles that could provide interesting data, be sure to share the name and user stats below.
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About author
Mike Smith
Mike Smith
I have been obsessed with sim racing and racing games since the 1980's. My first taste of live auto racing was in 1988, and I couldn't get enough ever since. Lead writer for RaceDepartment, and owner of SimRacing604 and its YouTube channel. Favourite sims include Assetto Corsa Competizione, Assetto Corsa, rFactor 2, Automobilista 2, DiRT Rally 2 - On Twitter as @simracing604

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Comments

WALEAD99
RedDedRcDepartment said:
"How Popular Are Our Favourite PC Racing Sims?"

Half the list is literally arcades, come on man.
Click to expand...
and they have simracing no one heart it or play it like ARSX ,Simulator Carrera turismo (for argentina people) copa marcas,formula truck 2013,race07,GT Legends,GTR2,F1 challenge 99-02,Grand prix 4 ,Nascar 2003 and more
 
WALEAD99
mod-edit: please don't post info that is obviously false. R3E is not a pay to win title.
 
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Marcel B.
For iRacing you can pick the steam number and roughly multiply it by 10 -> gets you the concurrent player amount (I cross-checked it with actual numbers through all the series).
That was measured when usage was low... it could well be that later afternoon utc-time, the factor is more than 10 (steamdb +/- 200 peak).
 
R.Man
There seems to be a pattern that is showing that most of the sim titles that have devs that don't really listen to their community or don't do it "correctly" have their sim abandoned by the players one way or another. What is sad is many of those studio decide to only fullfill the real community needs few years after release and when the players become totally angry and some even have turned for being fans to haters...
 
Marcel B.
bworthen23 said:
How many favourite racing sims are there? Name some more.... or stop whining when he's showing the arcade titles literally to make a point that we are a niche audience. Funny how vocal the tiny RF2 fan base is when AC original is still one of the most popular simulations in service. Not to mention iRacing not even listed, probably to avoid the toxic fan boy banter in the chat from the both the RF2 and iRacing shills.
Click to expand...
Well, to my surprise, I don't see much toxicity in the comments so far. These numbers are flawed anyway in more than one way -> peaks mean ****. More relevant would be amount of active players over a period of time, duration of playing sessions (amount of time using the sim over a specific period, e.g. time played per 24hrs) and population of online playing.
 
RCHeliguy
Premium
Damage Inc said:
Humans are VERY tribal, VERY biased and VERY prejudiced in everything they do.
Click to expand...

I do find it funny how some people refer to others who like a product that they are not a fan of as "shills". Because obviously if someone doesn't agree with your exact priorities and preferences they must be paid to express that opinion. Rational people would agree with you about everything right? LOL!

We should be grateful that there are as many choices as there are for this niche market.

I own AC, ACC, PC2, Kart Kraft, Dirt Rally 1.0, Dirt Rally 2.0, and iRacing.

I've uninstalled and no longer use a number of those titles, BUT I did purchase them. So I've helped support a number of titles that I don't use and I'm glad they are there for others even if I don't play them.

The two I like the most have gotten a lot of hate. Despite the fact that you can now buy Dirt Rally 2.0 on sale with all the DLC very inexpensively, as it was released people ranted on and on about it being a money grab. If you are cost conscious their model should be appealing. They release a product and recover their development costs up front by people who are willing to pay for it and then they drop the price dramatically so that it is extremely affordable. I've seen Dirt Rally 1.0 for under $10 and it was a BLAST!

At the other end of the price spectrum I like iRacing. The irony is that what pulled me in was that I could pay even more ($100/yr) for the Virtual Racing School (VRS) that has video showing how to drive each track/car combination for scheduled races. Then I could drive the same track and car under identical conditions and compare my telemetry against their known good driver and see where I could improve. Then for races where you can modify your setup they offer multiple setups that you could try and tweak to preference. Now that they have a very solid and highly customizable AI engine, they check all the boxes. I can learn to be a better driver with instruction, practice against AI's if I feel the need and then race against real people when I'm ready. Granted that takes time that I frequently don't have, but that is the draw for me.
 
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D
Amir Vodokotlic said:
AMS 2 / Ignition/ rf2 / RRE make no sense.

How do they still afford to have dlcs? when player base isn't there.
Click to expand...
thats not how licensing works my dude
also raceroom had some trickery behind it, they can lean back on the KW side of the business
 
Cote Dazur
What is popular and what I like is usually very different. As a VR, DD wheel, tactile sim racer, I am a niche within a niche, within a niche, so my choice, based on my preference may or may not be popular with the crowd. It is to be expected.

All that matter to me is that enough other people are populating my niche, so the developers or the modders keep improving the product that I like.

As a big fan of AC and ACC, I am please for Kunos, that both their title are well used, appreciated and generate revenue for them to keep producing product that I use and enjoy.

I hope Reiza does not get discouraged and improve AMS2.

For the rest of the SIM, their usage mirror how much I use them as well.
For the non SIM, or arcade, I do not use them, does not make them bad, just bad for me.
 
S
Damage Inc said:
Humans are VERY tribal, VERY biased and VERY prejudiced in everything they do.
Click to expand...

But some more than others ;)

So much gunpowder is and has been used on internal rivalry 'real sim vs. real sim', where the energy could have been spent on something positive solution-oriented. Like e.g. thoughts on how our nerdy esport niche could turn out to be a success. on the global game market.

Personally, I have more or less always been the more laid back guy, especially when I can see that the developers have a nose for the 'sim part' and I see progress, whether it comes from the game developers themselves or the large sub-environment of dedicated modders with a feel for real world motorsports.

I have to go all the way back to the years 1996-1999, when I mainly concentrated on 1 sim (GP2 and the online league Little Formula Racing Series). Today, despite my precious time (family dad with busy days), I typically in the course of 2-3 months go through maybe 85% of my sim game collection collected over the years and have a hard time dropping one of them completely. Just with the exception of iRacing and ACC, where I sadly had to admit that I did not get anything out of it, unless I limited my large spread out into the deep sea of good sims incl. mods, new and old, down to a few - so declined extension of my iRacing subscription, but don't hit me if I am not tempted to return soon again, that's my nature not being able to limit myself (I'm not daring to count on what expensive sim gear and what dedicated sim cave I could have added to my house with if I had concentrated on maybe 2-3 sims and bought hardware for the rest of my sim investmenst instead of sim games and software :D).

In the past, this could cause internal rivalry wars in my head, but I have realized that it is most fun to focus on what works instead of focusing on the shortcomings. Even the best sims and mods have flaws, but the best ones also provide really many enjoyable hours.

Back to my point. Through recent years I've had luck telling friends and relatives about my hobby for plenty decades opening their eyes for the difference between arcade, sim-cade and 'real sim' and actually surpriced that most of them threw the gloves and got the engines started, just with tiny giudance.

So there's plenty of hope. I think, that 'real sim' could be a success.
And especially with sim communities as this one, making healthy discussions of posibillities and approces for a bright future for 'real sims'.

As a user here mentioned, the arcade titles FH4 and FH5 probably have made more FH gamers buying sim-gear than the entire 'real sim engine' users added together. So now the arcaders are getting the gear, there's no excuse for lurking them into the right place ;)
 
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mantasisg
I wonder how many people know that guy who basically created most of the juicy rF2 stuff got employed by iRacing recently ? NOT S397 who publicly announced looking for physics expert. iR even before were positively improving despite it always being a leading sim in the industry, but obviously it is completely on the branch of it is own, insulated from the rest, it not being included in the article adds up to that.

Listen.

HeY LiSTen ! Hey !

I don't even like iRacing, ok ? I think it is bad choice in terms of money, and its multiplayer is overrated and could be better. It is not moddable and I like all vehicles, iR is limited on racecars, and mostly modern. But we have to admit that they keeps going up, while the rest of simracing is tumbling down definitely. If you need a proof to that, then it means you haven't been paying attention on simracing. I also must admit, that I will commit to iRacing if rest of simracing inevitably becomes trash(in terms of realism and sim vibe).

The rest of simracing right now is like: buy this rig, buy this wheel, buy these pedals. Notice what is missing ? An H-shifter ? Well yes.. But I meant simracing softwares being in the background of gear. Hey I wonder what makes more money hmmmm.

After I personally lost hope in Kunos sim becoming leading of the industry sim, I converted my hopes in rF2 which was very reasonable at a time, but what happened ?
 
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Kyuubeey
Honestly I think it's a bit misguided to think racing sims will ever become "mainstream", or that it'd even be good to begin with. The content would basically be forced to be less compelling to appeal to a wider audience; it's how it works with everything. You either appeal A LOT to one demographic, or a little bit to everyone. Surely racing sims are more approachable than something like military flight simulations, but they're not *that* far off in what kind of personality is needed to really get into the 'sim' aspect.

Probably better to spend that energy actually having discussions and collaborations to push consumer simulations forward. You can count one one hand the amount of people in car sims who are trying to push the physics forward and discuss about it in public and challenge their models with comparison. It seems like nobody anywhere is actually trying to create a realistic racing *environment* but I suppose we're not yet at that stage.

Although my impression is almost all "hardcore simracers" are actually casuals with some sprinkles on top. It's not that the amount of people who are really into the sim aspect and would actually enjoy needing to be skilled in race engineering to setup the car, or needing to have very high level driving technique to keep the tires within parameters in a race is less; it's just that there are also a ton more casual simmers on top of that who truthfully don't care much at all about the 'sim' part, but a whole lot about the 'immersion' part.
 
Cote Dazur
Kyuubeey said:
who truthfully don't care much at all about the 'sim' part, but a whole lot about the 'immersion' part.
Click to expand...
Very good point, thank you.

To me, the 'sim' part, without the 'immersion' part, is useless. But I can live with the 'immersion' part with a lesser 'sim' part.

Simulation is needed as an enabler of my real goal, which is immersion.
Immersion is triggered by many aspects, one of the very important one being an accurately simulated behavior.
 
Damage Inc
RCHeliguy said:
I do find it funny how some people refer to others who like a product that they are not a fan of as "shills". Because obviously if someone doesn't agree with your exact priorities and preferences they must be paid to express that opinion. Rational people would agree with you about everything right? LOL!

We should be grateful that there are as many choices as there are for this niche market.

I own AC, ACC, PC2, Kart Kraft, Dirt Rally 1.0, Dirt Rally 2.0, and iRacing.

I've uninstalled and no longer use a number of those titles, BUT I did purchase them. So I've helped support a number of titles that I don't use and I'm glad they are there for others even if I don't play them.

The two I like the most have gotten a lot of hate. Despite the fact that you can now buy Dirt Rally 2.0 on sale with all the DLC very inexpensively, as it was released people ranted on and on about it being a money grab. If you are cost conscious their model should be appealing. They release a product and recover their development costs up front by people who are willing to pay for it and then they drop the price dramatically so that it is extremely affordable. I've seen Dirt Rally 1.0 for under $10 and it was a BLAST!

At the other end of the price spectrum I like iRacing. The irony is that what pulled me in was that I could pay even more ($100/yr) for the Virtual Racing School (VRS) that has video showing how to drive each track/car combination for scheduled races. Then I could drive the same track and car under identical conditions and compare my telemetry against their known good driver and see where I could improve. Then for races where you can modify your setup they offer multiple setups that you could try and tweak to preference. Now that they have a very solid and highly customizable AI engine, they check all the boxes. I can learn to be a better driver with instruction, practice against AI's if I feel the need and then race against real people when I'm ready. Granted that takes time that I frequently don't have, but that is the draw for me.
Click to expand...
yup, I have PC1/PC2/AC/ACC/RF2/R3E/AMS1/AMS2. Don't possess the time to do them all justice but I've played and enjoyed them all to varying degrees and feel no need to slag any of them off.
 
S
Kyuubeey said:
Although my impression is almost all "hardcore simracers" are actually casuals with some sprinkles on top. It's not that the amount of people who are really into the sim aspect and would actually enjoy needing to be skilled in race engineering to setup the car, or needing to have very high level driving technique to keep the tires within parameters in a race is less; it's just that there are also a ton more casual simmers on top of that who truthfully don't care much at all about the 'sim' part, but a whole lot about the 'immersion' part.
Click to expand...

You might have an important point there.

But in relation to my above mentioned experiences on how surprisingly easy it has been for me during recent couple of years of eye openers for common consumer gamers into our 'real sim' niche world. Just with small teasers and my very limited instructions on common driving virues in various sims- and they were on the go, and only 1 of 5 has not yet invested in sim gear.

I could compare this with my own perception of e.g. role-playing games of which I have never played and always considered a complex, nerdy closed world for me, thinking it is far easier for me managing my tyres through right driving an right setup ;) Yet roleplaying games are top-sellers on the game market.

It's probably basically about serving it the right way for the curious newcomers.
As I see it, this is the biggest obstacle combined with the (partial) necessity of a hardware i.e. simgear investment.
 
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RCHeliguy
Premium
mantasisg said:
The rest of simracing right now is like: buy this rig, buy this wheel, buy these pedals. Notice what is missing ? An H-shifter ? Well yes.. But I meant simracing softwares being in the background of gear. Hey I wonder what makes more money hmmmm.
Click to expand...

On the flip side as someone who enjoys iRacing, I still see them making mistakes.

I own a very nice H pattern shifter and I was saddened to see that iRacing dropped H pattern support for the (latest version) Miata used in races. They still have it for other cars and you can still drive the legacy cars, but I sorry to see them do this. I'll admit that when I was in Rookies I raced for points with paddle shifters, but that car was a blast to drive as a 5 speed. What was fun to me was that if you purposefully dropped the clutch wrong the car would buck like a real car. My motion system would pick up on that in a very convincing way. I laughed so hard the first time that happened!

That said, iRacing does support quite a number of shift methods in different cars.

 
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S
RCHeliguy said:
I own a very nice H pattern shifter and I was saddened to see that iRacing dropped H pattern support for the (latest version) Miata used in races. They still have it for other cars and you can still drive the legacy cars, but I sorry to see them do this. I'll admit that when I was in Rookies I raced for points with paddle shifters, but that car was a blast to drive as a 5 speed.
Click to expand...

When exactly did that occur? Rebooted my own iRacing subscription September 2020 (after nearly 10 years hibernation now with a new account starting from rookie scratch, but cancelled extension of my yearly subscription after not being so active on iR since late summer 2021, though having great races in higher classes) - to my memory the Miata I drove by that time was indeed with H-shifter support of which I always prefer, to me it was still easier with a natural feeling compared to the paddle drive.

I don't quite understand this change from iRacing? Is it due to some sort of upgrade of the real world SCAA Spec Miata, now driving with paddles (I don't know)?
 
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Pessio
Must people love to drive slow trucks around the autobahn.
This thing is crazy.
 
B
These numbers shows how hardcore simracers are few, which is not exactly a surprise, as it is demanding both in term of required hardware and physically (driving with sim hardware is physically exhausting and tiring, compared to say a pad).
The market has spoken and what the masses want is Forza Horizon and truck simulators in detailed open worlds.
 
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