An Obscure Physics Sim Is Reeling in Almost as Many Players as Forza Horizon 6 on Steam

It’s safe to call Forza Horizon 6 the biggest racing game of the year. Released back in May, it peaked at over 300,000 concurrent players on Steam days after launch. And remember—that’s just Steam, not including console and PC players through the Xbox platform, which Microsoft doesn’t publicly share player count logs for. But all hype subsides and everything that is up must come down, so, as of last month, FH6 averaged a hair under 29,000 concurrent players at any given time, a tenth of its record. It may surprise you to know what game is speeding up behind, and could soon be right on its gearbox.

BeamNG.drive , the vehicle physics sandbox that’s been playable, in one form or another, for more than a decade at this point, notched an average of 20,660 concurrent players on Steam in July, an 8.45% rise, per data first spotted by Overtake . The game, while technically still in early access, enjoys a thriving community of modders and just received its biggest update ever , which borrows an aspect of Gran Turismo’s open-source tone-mapping system for more lifelike colors and lighting.

I will admit that I personally have very limited experience with BeamNG.drive —frankly, I haven’t the slightest idea where to start. I’m probably most familiar with it through TikToks where players fling vehicles of various types and sizes off ramps under different gravities. If you ever wanted to know what would happen to a Cybertruck subject to 30 times the forces of Earth, BeamNG’s your game.

If you can drive it—or crash it—it’s in BeamNG.drive .

Nevertheless, this is an interesting development, one that goes beyond inside-baseball industry relevance. Triple-A games costing $80 are becoming more and more commonplace, and even the ones that technically cost less to get in, like FH6 , upsell their audience to premium versions with more goodies for as much as $120. Grand Theft Auto VI notably will launch with an $80 standard release that locks you out of customizing characters and vehicles, which is obviously a huge draw of GTA for many players. To get those privileges, you’ll need to drop $100 on the “Ultimate Edition.”

Are players getting tired of this? I don’t have the data in front of me to prove it, but it’s generally not a trend you’d figure most consumers would probably love. So it might mean something that a game that costs $25 and offers a billion different ways to have fun, so long as you are willing to get your hands dirty, is finding a similarly sized audience, at least on PC.

It’s also worth pointing out how completely different these two games are. BeamNG is an in-the-weeds simulation sandbox that everyone sets up differently to deliver the experience they’re looking for; Horizon is a pick-up-and-play open-world racing game that is pretty much as frictionless as they come, but still much more rigid in its format. FH6 also, like so many modern, big-budget games, operates on a FOMO loop, with limited-time rewards available to those who pour the most time in, to keep that active player count high.

They couldn’t be more unlike each other if they tried, and yet, they took the top two spots for the racing genre on Steam last month, with a massive gap to Assetto Corsa behind them.

SteamDB’s data since BeamNG’s release doesn’t indicate that this is attention is an aberration, either. Surveying the past decade, the game has trended up and up, first seriously gaining pace midway through 2020 into 2021. Its concurrent-player peak also occurred just last month immediately after that big update, when it notched 47,424 users. It’s clearly in a very healthy spot now, which is very impressive, particularly as it’s made by a modestly sized, independent team of 70 people, located all around the world. Maybe all the publishers charging big money yet closing studios could stand to learn a thing or two from them.

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