Greetings, fellow drivers

I realised that we were in dire need of decent racing games with actual 4 wheeled cars here. And if possible not 2 decade old.

I mead, we had some removal from catalog because of car manufacturers's short term/sighted licensing issues that kind of conflict ith the life cycles of videogames.

So far on GOG catalog, least old car racing game is Flatout 2, which is decent... but beyond that, we are quite starving.
We used to have Race driver: Grid (2008) but it disappeared...

So please, we could use some cool racing games, especially some that are either hard to find because not available on any digital stores, or some from publishers who so far seem to have good relationships with GOG.

Two candidates come to mind for me:

Blur, a "mario cart"-like racing game with regular carts and cute neon-light bonuses. Game is unavailable on digital stores. Partly made by folks from Bizarre Creations (who made the PGR serie), but sadly it is owned by Activision (so i guess it is nigh impossible to make deal with them)

Split/Second, another decent one, from 2010, which is still available on steam but hey, it has additional dreaded Securom (and the 2010 installment of the ugly thing, i might add) and so it could help being rescued or unshackled from this. It was published by Disney interactive, and so far, Disney seemed to have been generous with GOG lately.

On EA side sadly, no luck. Their last installment of Burnout is still "active" on their own service (well, it was far away from my favorite of the whole serie, tbh, but others liked it) and the good old ones (like burnout 2 or 3) had no PC port at all... But i wouldnt mind some older NFS, the very old ones like the first "hot pursuit" (because they had another one called exactly the same, way after that), or maybe the first "NFS underground" or "NFS Most Wanted" or such... (ah, no, i forgot: damn MUSIC licensing issues here)

I dont know who owns the Test Drive franchise, nowadays, it may have changed hands, or what ?

If other people have some other ideas, feel free to talk about it...

If only Codemasters would stop being so stubborn with Steam-only, their games would make an excellent addition here, even better most of their racing games support Windows/Mac/Linux. I'd be in first row to buy all of them.

They're older, but the racing sims from Papyrus would be cool to see here.

As post year 2000 games using many popular music as in-game soundtrack, I've always wondered if the licensing act as a deterrent. Many game publisher just don't wanna go to do the hassle negotiating it.

Okay, you try listing a driving game that doesn't have one of the following:

Licensed Car
Licensed Music
Licensed Likeness

I wonder why Hi-Octane still isn't here.

Licenses.....Licenses never change.The SimBin racing games would be the bomb here,but the work involved to bring them here is probably not worth it sadly.Cheers

As other have said licensing is the biggest killer here.

Any publisher considering pushing a previously released game will be stopped straight away by the licensing costs.

The only other options are
1) Simultaneous new release
or
2) Game with no licensed material.

Its mainly the big publishers that can afford to released licensed stuff, and they're too superstitious to release DRM free.

Which leaves us with number 2)

Which to be honest there are plenty of them.

What stopping them get released here is the multiplayer aspect.

Most of these games are built it the idea of competitive, ranked play from the outset. Single player is not the main concern.

Unfortunately while GoG now has a multiplayer API, its only recently been released and (as far as I am aware) does not have the full range of options developers are looking for when it comes to matched play.

I believe CDP understand this and are working on a solution.
Gwent. The back end infrastructure for Gwent is most likely going to be the ground work for a better multiplayer functionality.

But Its going to be at least another year before Gwent goes Live and shows what GoG can do.

After that, developers will have to pick up[ the new API.

Fingers crossed we'll see more of these games in about 2020

it is really because 99.9 % of all racing games are incredibly boring, sadly.





(the 0.1% is due to the Rollcage series and the first Burnout games, without them that number would be 100%)

gotta agree here.

I am a huge fan of racing games so as soon as I started using Steam I started buying them there. Sadly, 9 out of 10 are, I won't say 'shit', but they just aren't that great.

I am enjoying Burnout quite a bit and F1 Race Stars is pretty nice for fans of "silly" racing games, ie Mario Cart, but most of them just aren't worth the cost and the download.

i like car racing but car racing on gog seems to be a minority on a minority platform

That and Re-Volt, but you try negotiating with a company with no metaphorical returns address.

Re-Volt is impossible! :P
The AI cheats out of their ass. You can have a full lap lead, but you spin just bit, and the entire field passes you. Evidently they use warp gates or something.

We have Ignition!!
The infamous rubber band effect... I hate this too.

I don't know why you think they're boring, but know that tastes vary among folks; i love (sim)racing games and i also happen to enjoy civilian flight sims, which is another genre that a lot people find boring (i heard the "but it doesn't happen anything" a lot of times) but i find them amazing for a good amount of reasons. Yes please! :)