Motorsport Games Delay IndyCar 23

In the regular earnings call for investors and interested parties, Motorsport Games announced Friday that IndyCar 23, the title announced almost two years ago, would not likely release within the calendar year.

Motorsport Games CEO Dmitry Kozko:

For our IndyCar game, we continue to make strides in our development efforts but we do not believe we will be in a satisfactory position to release it to the community this year. The IndyCar community has not had a dedicated IndyCar game in over a decade and we want to make sure that our IndyCar game is on par with other major racing games out there.

This is quite a bitter pill for me to swallow as back in 2021 I wanted to join the company based on the IndyCar announcement, and if you follow me on Twitter where I am CONSTANTLY talking about Papyrus’ IndyCar Racing franchise, you’ll know how much it would have meant to me to have a good product released. It’s frustrating, having left the company, to look back on the excitement we all had for this.

Did I try to get involved and change things? Hell yes, and that’s a huge part of why I left. But that’s a story I won’t yet tell.

Since that time, things have really changed so much. The good people who do exist at Motorsport Games and the studios they now own are overshadowed by events out of their control. We’ve seen iRacing pull all IndyCar-related branding due to (as announced in 2021) “an exclusive relationship” Motorsport Games holds that, some argue, shouldn’t even apply to them. But, maybe that’s not the issue at all, is it? I’m all for any company coming along, licensing a series and putting out a product – good or bad – but why affect others in licensing? Why exclusively license anything?

Whether it has been SEGA with Daytona, EA with Porsche, NASCAR and F1, Sony with F1, Codemasters with F1, or anyone else, everybody knew at least one studio that was putting out a product that would have used that license better but was stifled by exclusivity. However, these always occurred when products were not developed on an ongoing basis. It’s insane to me that anyone (including IndyCar) would ever sign an agreement that means another developer feels like they need to rip content out of their continually updated game that has been there for years.

If a product is good, they won’t need exclusivity. Stop it.

Oh, and yeah, although I know a lot of screenshots have leaked over the past six months I’m going to continue using the officially released ones from (lol) 10 months ago, even though they are watermarked like the press are going to steal them.