Motorsports Games has posted their Q1 2023 financial reports and it’s more exciting than just numbers.
Back on April 19th, some of you might recall that we posted news of Stephen Hood’s return to Motorsports Games, and with the first quarter of the year behind us, Motorsports Games has now posted their Q1 2023 financials here.
Reading these reports is like a quarterly present for me as they always divulge exciting news in order to keep their investors happy. This wasn’t the case for most of last year but with Stephen Hood as CEO, there appears to be some forward momentum at the company again. Publicly trading under the ticker MSGM, Motorsports Game’s future was looking pretty bleak and while a lot of eyes might be on iRacing as simracing’s darling, Motorsports Games efforts remain largely unknown. They own traxion.gg, rFactor 2, KartKraft and even poses the rights to a the upcoming “BTCC” (“British Touring Car Championship”), “Indycar”, and “Le Mans” sim racing titles. Wait, three games under one roof, at the same time?
Well over 10 years old now, rFactor2’s content library remains as fragmented as ever and while most of the cars are exciting to drive, even providing some of the most realistic driving experiences around, the greater sim racing community has had a hard time understanding the direction behind rFactor 2’s development.
If you’ve been paying attention, you might have noticed that Studio 397 has been investing their efforts developing all sorts of random content that feels like they are just making whatever they can secure the license too, but rest assured, they have a plan.
rFactor 2 appears to have been made a test bed for Studio 397’s continued content production with a heavier emphasis on their “competition system” (rename pending). This content will no doubt benefit rFactor 2 in the long run but I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of their content repackaged into separate titles that are entirely focused on a particular racing discipline.
In February, the Honda Civic Type R was added to rFactor 2, bringing their number of BTCC cars up to 7.
That same month, they added the laserscanned Long Beach circuit, a popular track on the Indycar calendar and a circuit that no “Indy game” would be complete without.
In the Q1 2023 financials, Stephen Hood had some input to share:
“The racing genre has, for decades, promoted a sense of ultra-competitiveness that I feel prevents rapid growth of the segment. Le Mans and the World Endurance Championship (WEC) revolves around teamwork. It is therefore fitting that our long-planned move into team racing begins with the release of our competition system into the rFactor 2 simulation-style game – which has seen a useful growth period thanks to third-party community platform support as well as our formal quarterly content release strategy. From there we will gather valuable consumer feedback ahead of a wider release alongside the upcoming Le Mans game, which in turn, should provide us with insight into the concept of team play within the racing genre.”
For anyone unaware, Studio 397 is no stranger to Le Mans as their rFactor 2 title has been the host of several Virtual24H events under the FIA. In their 2023 Q2 update for rFactor, the post ended with a teaser:
“2023 is a very exciting year for rFactor 2, and we have plenty more content and multiplayer updates which we look forward to bringing to you very soon! We can’t let you in on all of the secrets just yet, but let’s just say that rFactor 2 will never be the same again…”
With all this exciting news, I suspect that rFactor 2’s content will be used to repackaged to populate three separate titles under Motorsports Games. One will be called “Le Mans”, one “Indycar”, and the others will be called “BTCC” —be thankful one isn’t called “GT3”. What rFactor 2 will become, if not a test bed, remains to be seen.
You can find the box art for all three of these unannounced titles in the Q1 2023 slideshow on page 10.
More news to come!