A while back EA, who owns Codemasters, put a stop to development of rally racing games. Then more recently we mourned the death of Forza Motorsport, as Microsoft laid off a multitude of people including reportedly 120 from Turn 10. Now we're learning that EA is ending Need for Speed development. Criterion, who developed Need for Speed: Unbound, has been shifted to development of Battlefield.
Codemasters not developing any more rally games is a disappointment, since they were so good, but not terribly surprising considering that racing games are a niche genre and rally racing is a niche within a niche. Perhaps the sales just didn't justify the cost of development any longer. Forza Motorsport might also be understandable if it wasn't raking in enough money, as I have no doubt it's expensive to develop on account of the hundreds of cars, not to mention tracks that were supposedly laser-scanned, although Forza Motorsport used to be one of Xbox's flagships.
Need for Speed being shelved, on the other hand, does surprise me a bit more. Yes, it's a racing game, which is more niche than ball sports, shooters, and action games, but it seemed to me to have a broader appeal than more serious racing games. I don't know what sorts of sales figures we're talking about here, and I have trouble finding real numbers, but reportedly Unbound under-performed. I don't know how reliable VGChartz.com is, but they list sales for several, though not all, NFS titles, and it looks like around the era of Underground and Underground 2 through Undercover they were selling 8.9 to 17.8 million apiece, but by the time we get to No Limits through Heat sales are down to 3.4 million each.
Not only is that a massive decline in sales over the years, but the cost of game development has constantly increased rather than plateaued or decreased. Again, I have trouble finding solid numbers, but top end games can cost $200 or $300 million, so it doesn't seem unrealistic to figure for at least $100 million for a typical game. The rising development budget alone would have been enough of an obstacle but it's even worse to pair with that massively declining sales.
Even with the 3.4 million figures being significantly down from 9.9 to 17.8 million, 3.4 million is still a lot better than the 1.5 million that VGChartz.com reported for Forza Motorsport 7. I can't find figures for Forza Motorsport (2023) but with it on Game Pass that complicates the data, I would imagine. I would suspect that rally games are even more niche than these.
I am left concerned. This trend of racing games being halted is worrying for a fan of such games. We're not talking obscure titles, either, but huge names in the genre. If Need for Speed and Forza Motorsport can't carry on, what hope do we have for the genre at large? I mean, Forza Motorsport was, during the Xbox 360 generation at least, the benchmark by which other console racing games were judged. Need for Speed got its own theatrical movie, mediocre as it was. Suddenly they can no longer carry on?
Admittedly, I haven't been a fan of Need for Speed in a long time. I enjoyed Hot Pursuit 2 on GameCube, and Underground and Underground 2. After that, however, they repeatedly failed to do anything for me for a long time. Unbound, ironically, was the first in a long time to hold my interest for more than an hour or so. I say "ironically" because, from what I've read, that performed notably worse than other recent titles, though without figures I don't know how true that is. Obviously I'm not the only person that lost interest in the NFS series. Forza Motorsport, while not perfect, still felt to me like a good product, but I felt like the team didn't know what to do beyond flopping a bunch of cars and tracks on our laps. Hopefully this means that racing games aren't dying so much as perhaps tastes and interests are shifting towards different properties offering something more fresh and new. I don't want the genre to die.
