The state of racing games lately is just awful.
Gran Turismo 7, Chocobo GP, Hotwheels Unleashed, Mario Kart Tour, Asphalt 9, and more games have these awful monetization practices that manipulate players to spend money or even worse, harm their experience unless they fork over the money.
Other games like Forza, GRID, Mario Kart 8, and Need for Speed have completely stagnated in terms of quality. They have given up focusing on the game mechanically to improve the game and instead focus on content which causes the games to have no innovations, or worse, lose previous innovations.
Trackmania and Kartrider lock themselves away from other platforms, failing to reach a larger playerbase despite how much work they put in to engage the players they do have.
Indie developers and Middleware developers innovate and push the genre forward, but their low budgets and small teams lead to games with low amounts of content that can be experienced very quickly. No matter how good those games are they can't produce something big, so they lack impact. They just don't get enough attention to change something in the industry. Grip, Hotshot Racing, Cruis'n Blast, art of rally, Redout, Distance, and Intertial Drift? Basically ignored.
The result?
Frustratingly average or boring racing games that shove predatory monetization schemes down your throat get all the attention and the actual gems of the racing genre remain practically undiscovered.
I hate seeing this happen to one of my favorite genres of gaming.
