5 on Steam’s Top Sellers chart. 302 people playing it right now.

iRacing Arcade launched on March 3rd, and by April it had climbed into Steam’s upper echelon of best-selling games. But sales charts and player counts tell two very different stories about the same product.

The game sits at “Mostly Positive” on Steam — 75% of 588 reviewers giving it a thumbs up. Dig into those reviews and a pattern emerges: players call it “fun,” “colorful,” “pleasant,” and above all, “basic.” One reviewer with four hours logged described it as “a fun, colorful, cute little sim” with “basic character and car customization.” Another at 7.6 hours praised the smooth performance but warned that AI opponents on higher difficulties “will do everything in their power to push you off track.”

Fun. Smooth. Basic. These are not the words that built iRacing’s reputation.

For nearly two decades, iRacing has been the gold standard of hardcore sim racing — the domain of dedicated rigs, force-feedback wheels, and drivers who treat a virtual lap of the Nordschleife with the same gravity as the real thing. iRacing Arcade is not that product. Developed by Original Fire Games (the studio behind Circuit Superstars) and published under the iRacing banner, it’s a top-down, third-person arcade racer with squished cars, oversized crash helmets, and bite-sized races that rarely exceed five minutes.

The Revenue-vs-Retention Gap

Steam’s Top Sellers chart ranks by revenue, not player count. A $19.99 game at #5 is generating serious money — enough to outpace countless titles with ten times its player base. The 20% launch discount (down from $24.99) is doing exactly what discounts do: driving units at launch.

But 302 concurrent players, more than a month after release, is a brutal retention number. That’s fewer people than most legacy racing sims hold at any given moment. OverTake.gg scored it 3 out of 5, noting that “the iRacing label perhaps led to many expecting more, particularly on the content side.” Traxion.GG was more generous at 8/10, praising the career mode but flagging rough multiplayer and thin content.

The content complaints are consistent across every review. Eight cars total. Two licensed — the Fiat 500 and the Porsche 911 GT3 Cup. Fourteen tracks. No alternative layouts. One reviewer compared it unfavorably to Super Woden: Rally Edge, a solo-dev indie game with 90 cars. When a one-person studio is putting you to shame on vehicle count, the value proposition at $24.99 gets uncomfortable.

What the Brand Bought

iRacing president Tony Gardner was candid about the strategy when the Original Fire Games partnership was announced. “Games like these cultivate new racing enthusiasts who eventually become the next generation of sim racers and the future player base for our simulations,” he said.

This is a pipeline play. Build a casual on-ramp, capture younger players, convert them to the flagship sim later. Sound logic on paper. In practice, it means the iRacing name is being used to move a product that, by multiple expert reviews, doesn’t match the depth or scope that name implies.

The 75% positive rating reinforces the tension. “Mostly Positive” is fine — but for a studio trading on a reputation for category-defining excellence, it reads more like a ceiling than a floor. Players aren’t angry. They’re just not impressed enough to stick around.

The multiplayer situation compounds the retention problem. There’s no server browser, no automatic matchmaking — just custom lobbies accessed via numerical codes. Traxion’s review team reported laggy performance, phantom collisions, and generally jerky online play. For a game published by the company that essentially defined competitive online sim racing, barebones multiplayer with performance issues is a bad look.

A Fine Game With the Wrong Name on the Box

Strip away the branding and you have a competent, charming arcade racer with a genuinely engaging career mode, clean visuals, and excellent performance across hardware. Silent’s Blog confirmed stable 60 FPS on a GTX 1070 at 720p, and well over 200 FPS on modern GPUs. It runs well. It looks good. The career mode — where you build a team campus, hire drivers, and manage upgrades across multiple seasons — is surprisingly deep.

The problem isn’t the game. It’s the gap between what the iRacing name promises and what the product delivers — and the even larger gap between what the sales chart says and what 302 concurrent players confirms.

Console versions are expected this summer, alongside local split-screen multiplayer and DLC. More content could help. But the Steam data has already written the review that matters: the iRacing brand moved units. It couldn’t move players into the driver’s seat for more than a weekend.

Sources