Project CARS 3

~ the obituary ~

Project CARS started as a crowdfunded simulation, built by Slightly Mad Studios with money and feedback from the people who were going to play it, and the first two games were taken seriously by the sort of person who owns a force feedback wheel and a bolted-down seat. Project CARS 3 came out on 28 August 2020, published by Bandai Namco, with over 140 circuits, a twenty-four hour cycle, seasonal variation, weather and VR support on PC.

Then it turned out to be an arcade racer. Tire wear was gone, and so was fuel depletion, and pit stops went with them. The features taken out were precisely the ones that had made the previous two games worth the setup cost, and the audience that had funded the series worked this out within hours of release. IGN's review called it so fundamentally different from its immediate forerunners that it bordered on unrecognizable.

The scores landed where you would expect from a game that changed genre between sequels and kept the number on the box. Metacritic gave it 68 on PC, 70 on PS4 and 69 on Xbox One. OpenCritic had 48 percent of critics recommending it. None of that is a disaster on its own; a 69 is a game somebody liked. The problem was who it was sold to.

~ the case file ~

~ what they took out ~

Sales came in fifth on the US physical chart and seventeenth in the UK, and 86 percent below Project CARS 2. In Japan it moved 2,404 copies on PS4 in its first week. A simulation series had traded a small audience that cared a great deal for a large audience that already had several arcade racers and no particular reason to switch.

Electronic Arts, by way of its purchase of Codemasters, which had bought Slightly Mad Studios in 2019, canceled further development on the franchise in November 2022. Project CARS 3 was the last mainline game in the series, and the thing that ended it was not a court or a bankruptcy but a line in a publisher's portfolio review.

~ the long shutdown ~

The end was announced in July 2025 and executed in two steps. On 24 August 2025 the game was delisted from digital stores, so nobody new could buy it. On 24 February 2026 the online servers were switched off. The most likely reason given was the ordinary one for a racing game: the licenses for the cars and the circuits run out, and renewing them for a title that stopped selling years ago is not worth the paperwork.

Existing owners keep the game and its single-player content, which is more than the players of a live service usually get. What went on 24 February was multiplayer, the leaderboards and anything that needed to phone home. I did not play this one and I am not the person who lost anything that day. The people who did are the ones who bought it in 2020, left it installed for five years, and found out in a blog post in July 2025 that the online half of it had a date printed on it all along.

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