Why did racing become a dead genre? Is it because the average gamer doesn't have a driver's license?

It hasn't died, tens of millions of people play Forza Horizon, various sims like AC and Iracing are very popular too.
The issue is Horizon being so popular it pretty much killed everything else, and unlike shit like Fortnite, there's less money to be made in racing games, so other studios don't even care to try.

SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

That image is of a 2008 PC racing game that was designed for an Xbox controller and got a bizarre and unnecessary arcade port several years later.

Realism and DEI killed it. See NFS Heat. The most cringe dialogues with the shittiest songs ever. NFS peaked with old Most Wanted where you could kill cops with giant donut and stuff. Indies only try to make their games to look old but their gameplay is usually very bad, see Victory Heat Rally.

They killed any sense of progression. You don't even start with a shitbox in some cases and go straight to super car because of those sweet marketing deals.

I just don't find them exciting to play.

It’s alive and well. Mario Kart World will prove it

saves your genre

I don't know. They went the way of like those train simulators where people buy them to play as specific brands of cars instead of having atmosphere and fun races.

I'm open to playing more, but I'm not a car guy, you gotta give me more than just specific licensed cars.

This is the truth. Cars of the last 20 years are all the same fake-SUV, stupidly oversized truck, same shitty hybrid engine, or the same goofy "le future is here" EV. There's no variety even in chassis shapes any more, they all have very similar sized engines, there's just nothing.. (and no nobody actually gives a flying fuck about the latest horse car)

Grand Theft Auto IV came out and mogged all racing games so hard the genre imploded.
There are some playable games, Wreckfest and BeamNG but they're not quite on the level of the GOAT.

I miss the Midnight Club series. Fuck Rockstar for letting this franchise fade away.

Mario Kart is not a racing game.

dead genre?

but the most popular game ever is a racing game

Neck yourself, brown simp hellspawn.

What is it then?

Are you okay?

If you mute the music and skip all the story and dialogues NFS Unbound is a solid game..

It's a party game.

its a game where you race

Sadly yeah, open world slop has really eaten the arcade racing game's lunch. In GTA you can race as well as do tons of other shit, which is clearly superior to just a racing game.

I really enjoyed The Crew, just wish it was a better game, the second one was pure shit except for the map size.

Cars themselves became boring. If you're not gonna put all the classics and nostalgic ones, wtf are you gonna race ? Bland SUVs and EVs ? I know that I tend to say that driving shitboxes in gran turismo is cool but those cars are so mundane I'd rather have a Renault twingo race or an early 2000s yaris one.

gas prices too high, nobody can just drive for fun anymore

A party racer?

It's fucking nuts these days, man. Early 00s you could get bored and go on an interstate roadtrip for like $10 in gas, now that buys you like a quarter of a tank.

people don't get that this is part of GTAs magic. it's a racing game where you can kill homeless people with a bat

they better go all out in gta6. optional manual transmission and everything.

Mario Kart spawned a whole subgenre, "kart racers," dozens of cartoon license titles each one worse than the next, still racing tho

for real, if you threw your friend two dollars and fifty cents he would chauffer you around town

I have never killed any homeless NPCs in GTA, plenty of women tho.

It's a pain to get my wheel and pedal set out / setup; I prefer some IRL light hooning in my miata.

Test Drive Unlimited devolved the genre into an open world slop without the life sim element that made it good

The Crew 2

you drive for likes and upboats

LMAO, ubishite is such a fuckig joke, they intentionally built up every so many games to ape Rockstar, but never had the barins or balls to achieve GTA's success

Which racing/car video game would be ideal for me?

I hate Mario Kart

I hate F-Zero

I hate Diddy Kong Racing

I hate Kirby Air Ride

Anti-Mario Kart game

Game with anti-Nintendo aesthetics

Game with anti-Mario Kart gameplay

oh me neither, it was descriptive.
it's a racing game where you can fuck hookers

Depends on whether you want arcade physics, life sim, or simcade

Celebrities who are travelling the world in private planes are saying it's bad because of climate warmin- I mean climate change.

i want a new star wars podracer game or at least something in that style where you're going sideways to slip through cracks and crevices.

I'm looking for realism.
I want car/racing games to look as anti-Mario Kart as possible.

And I want their gameplay to be as opposite to Mario Kart as possible.

Climate Change is real, but it will take rich people not being as rich to stop it, so it won't stop ;)

just play rrt4, it`s the goat

Something made in the 21st century gramps

Start with Wreckfest.

You want Anon Babble's videogame general then, Anon Babble is more of an Outrun/Sleeping Dogs board. Need for Speed is about as realistic as it gets.

Gran Turismo, Assetto Corsa, BeamNG take your pick from least to most realistic

Do you recommend any Need for Speed?
That's why I want to avoid games that feature or focus on illegal racing.

Sorry to drop this on you bud, but no one ever cared about cars.

Pro Street was good. The name speaks for itself, it was professional, sponsored street racing. It was legal.

play the night-runners demo, then
lowkey the best game of 2024

Street car culture is dead, ricing is dead, old shitbox restorations are dying, new cars are so locked down that you can't have fun anymore.
All this translates to interest in racing games.

Need for Speed Porsche Unleashed

I'll play Pro Street on my PlayStation 2.

Maybe I'll download the PSP version to play it on my emulator on my tablet.

Having a lot of shit games released in the 2000s and 2010s didn't help but the overarching issue is declining IQ rates. Games better not ever inconvenience the player ever, so no totalling of your car with too many crashes, no complex road layouts, no split-second decision making to be first. And apparently a lot of people are also filtered by having to break before turns, with one guy I know telling me once that "he couldn't tell when the car breaks" whilst playing an arcade racing game from 2010. And that's after I pointed out the break lights to him and that he should pay attention to them.
All of thess factors combined led to at best stagnation in the genre and at worst regression. A PS1 era racing game plays hardly any different to a PS5 era racing game.
Driving sims are too aftaid to properly challenge the player without resorting to bullshit difficultly like 100 laps, arcade racers are too afraid to add sim elements like a more robust damage system, and non-racing driving games like Driver were killed by GTA.
I don't expect the genre to ever see a proper revival either, since indie devs are mostly nerds who only care for fantasy and sci-fi shit, while most racing games need to be set in contemporary (or period piece) urban environments which are like kryptonite to indie devs for some reason.

Anon Babble doesn't know shit about cars or video games

died off like nu-metal and skateboarding, the cultural zeitgeist moved on

Honestly I never knew it got a PSP version.

youtube.com/watch?v=KF6CNtnIRP0&pp=ygUcbmVlZCBmb3Igc3BlZWQgcHJvc3RyZWV0IHBzcA==

youtube.com/watch?v=9MMltMQ5s6I&pp=ygUcbmVlZCBmb3Igc3BlZWQgcHJvc3RyZWV0IHBzcA==

cars

Well yeah. Easily the worst practical board. At least Anon Babble can hang a shelf, Anon Babble can make a swan and Anon Babble doesn't even pretend to care about anything other than mcchickens and booze.

videogames

In general sure, but they're pretty into their multi monitor racing wheel setups. Millenial balding stepdad with filipino wife core.

most indie devs are vegitarian hippie nerds or align with that culture to be indistinguishable from them, they loathe cars cause they worship walkable city ecotopia ideals and blame fossil fuels for the climate crisis, etc... the whole car culture is entirely alien to them

Can't believe I forgot about Dirt Rally that game is the most fun punishing driving game I can think of

Rubberbanding AI

That is all it took to kill the racing genre.

Millenial balding stepdad with filipino wife core

A perfect description doesn't exi-

just play Assfault 9/Legends, it's my most played game on Switch ;)

MC got merged into GTA. The bad part is losing the MC sovl but honestly, it's kinda better to not have real cars because it's annoying dealing with license bullshit that limits a lot of customization. If someone wants real cars just mod them in. I do very much prefer Forza Horizon's handling than GTA's handling though

Nobody really cared about that. Rubberbanding was only SUPER prevalent in GT1 and F-Zero GX. I seriously don’t remember a Need for Speed where rubberbanding was that big of a deal.

I do hate that you can't destroy "real" cars in crashes in most games, but suits will be suits.

I seriously don’t remember a Need for Speed where rubberbanding was that big of a deal.

The genre died because the 2000's import/tuning culture died. It was a cash cow for a couple years, companies capitalized and once the well dried they moved on. Forza Horizon 1 proved to be the next cash cow to milk and it still continues to make gorillions.

Arcade games are mechanically brain dead shit for retards and sim games are so boring and sterile aesthetically they might as well be sleep aids. Sim games with exciting settings is the unserved market where racing games would shine, sadly nobody is ballsy enough to do it.

This isn't a racing game, it's a jrpg for people who hate racing.

You gotta be trash at these games man. Underground 1 had that one mission now that I think about it, that was scaled off your car’s level though and not how fast you were going.

Like fighting games is just basic melee combat gameplay, racing games is just basic movement gameplay you do to get from mission to mission in games. It still has a small, dedicated fanbase in the thousands but gaming overall has long since evolved.

lmao

Maybe you should stop playing tendie shit and MK clones if you hate them so much. You'd probably like pretty much any highly regarded racing game that wasn't Nintendo since none of them operate that way besides maybe wipeout

It still has a small, dedicated fanbase

yes

gaming overall has long since evolved.

LMAO
to what, sharkcards and v-bucks???
kys zoom-zoom

Car culture is dead, also games aren't allowed to be fun and genuine anymore so only niche autistic simulators survive

Unfortunately and unironically, yes. I never said evolved for the better, retard. But you need to get over it. Driving is mostly just something you do in other games now and it's been like that for a long time.

nobody plays GTA to race lmfao they had a 2x week for races recently and it was still dead

The entire game is about street racing to and from crime scenes, and against cops and other players.

redoing the same years old races over and over to grind RP

nah
I will for new tracks tho.

Driving is mostly just something you do in other games now and it's been like that for a long time.

what flavor of retardation is this?

Real life. Maybe play some games sometimes?

Too many nigger music.
Also, I'm waiting for Initial D to come on PC, which it never will.

arcades were already on their way out when home racing games hit their peak. if anything it was arcades dying that allowed racing games to flourish

like what, GTA? Which has had driving in it since long before the driving genre died?
Also why didn't it kill FPS games too?

nobody cares about games with unlicensed cars
car licensing got more expensive
FPS games took over the industry for a decade because COD was so popular
car culture is dead because zoomers are too scared to get their license and because they've been raised under constant propaganda over cars being racist and the cause of the supposed imminent climate catastrophe

sim fags killed them

Driving in games is nowhere near as fun as it is IRL. Maybe with the right hardware it would be, but I'm sure as fuck not wasting hundreds of dollars just to maybe have fun in one game genre.

No one can afford brand licenses except huge corpos and they all make shit. GT7 is the best racing game currently, it has nice graphics and the cars feel fun to drive, but everything else is shit. It’s only on PS, it’s full of fomo shit and overpriced cars, shitty race payouts that require you to grind one race forever because it’s the most time efficient, car lineup rotations so you can’t buy them when you want and invitations awarded only through roulette which are random and you can’t buy certain cars without them and you have 1 month to use them once you get them.

Actually, the halfway sim halfway arcade abomination that's Gran Turismo killed racing
Simfags were happy with their GTR2 and RBR

Car licensing is very strange and I can't make sense of it, especially when it comes to crashes and police chases. The assumption is that the rare/expensive manufacturers don't want that stuff but then stuff like picrel comes along where you have all these super rare and exotic cars (for it's time) getting destroyed in quite graphic crashes and getting involved in high speed police chases. It makes no sense.

Are you completely retarded?

Last racing game I played a bunch was one of the project gothams. It's kind of boring just driving through modern cities. Controller or keybaord doesn't do it. I think being able to mod the car is a needed feature.

As a kid, my parents actually cared about age ratings, so I wasn't allowed to player shooters and had to play racing games for the most parts. So shooters became the cool forbidden fruit, while racers are the safe and boring option. Even now, I'm interested in guns but don't care for cars at all.

no u

great argument, dumbass.

be kids

we rent ps2 for the weekend

bro gets Gran Turismo 4

wow look so real

bro spends the entire weekend driving

I fall asleep on the couch watching him run the same race over and over

Was me when I watched a friend play the original Assassin's Creed after he invited me back to his place after school. I even asked him continuously when I could play. Was the last time I hung out with him alone.

super rare and exotic cars (for it's time)

They still are super rare and exotic cars now. This game's car list is still one of the best out there with so much variety in such a tight package.

lol, what a dick

lmao literally a reddit take
remember a while ago some redditor telling me cars are a niche hobby
probably a tranny, because in the real world when you talk to men cars are definitely one of top subjects of conversation for easy small talk
nevermind all the racing games that are released yearly or nearly yearly (Forza,GT, NFS, fucking GTA) and still sell big numbers
car culture is still up and running

Because Legendary cars like the Skyline and Supra became jokes. One automatic and the other a BMW with a Toyota badge. The 350z hasn't changed since 2000's, it just got a facelift with Z.
The GR86 that was supposed to be the spiritual successor of the S15 and A86 is just a shitty Subaru and don't even have an OEM turbo.
All exotic cars are automatic and have electric motors.

Cars are just not exciting anymore. The isn't even any point in building an engine and try to make cars faster when you could just buy a Tesla that will easily beat all combustion engine cars with turbos, so car culture has become more about the appreciation of a begone era. It's boring.

My zoomer brother and his friends all have fancy whips
Me and my boys have shitbox autism

shame SE will probably never make something like this again

what about blur and splitsecond i thought they were unique

Any recs for somebody that started Most Wanted recently? Will beat Carbon after I'm done with this game.
Not a big fan of sims btw.

enjoy early-mid game before the rubberbanding becomes absoluetly retarded like in any other nfs game

It’s still fun and they flourished in the normal console and controller market

Racing died when the PS4 didn't launch with a ridge racer game on day one.

pls grind for months in GT or better yet, buy all the fancy new cars directly, bro

still cant fucking believe that car sound tech not only stagnated like a decade ago, they even got worse and all the retarded racing g*mers keep caring and talking only about graphics, like, you stupid fucking nigger, if i wanted to WATCH cars i have google images and youtube

I blame car companies, they are anal about muh brand and it looks like muh brand

Realism kill the genre.
I picked a gran turismo for my son a few years back and it was just so boring.

I miss NFS so much...

Sound quality in games died in general because gamers still only use 2w rattling TV speakers or el cheapo headsets that sound like sticking your head in a washing machine drum. Good audio is never coming back because gamers do not care about it.

That said wreckfest has some top quality audio - especially for the crunching of metal and shattering of glass.