Nacon has announced that it will take over WRC video game duties from EA and Codemasters, having signed an agreement with WRC Promoter to create new FIA World Rally Championship games for the next few years.
In a press release, Nacon says that it will publish official FIA WRC games between 2027 and 2032, and that it has “exclusive rights” to do so on PC and consoles “for six seasons”.
Lest you think Nacon is just going to continue EA and Codemasters’ work on the WRC series, however, think again. The French publisher says it will be creating “a complete reboot of the franchise, based on an entirely fresh vision”.
In the aforementioned press release, Nacon promises to “deliver an immersive experience that faithfully reflects the quality of the championship and meets the expectations of both rally enthusiasts and new players”.
The publisher says that all of the official teams, rallies, vehicles, and drivers from the FIA WRC will be featured in its games, as will sponsor brands. In short, it sounds like this will be every bit as faithful to the event as EA’s series was.
This is, of course, not Nacon’s first rodeo (or perhaps that should be rally) when it comes to WRC games. Between 2015 and 2020, the WRC franchise was under Nacon’s stewardship, with racing stalwart Codemasters subsequently snapping it up.
Following that, Codemasters found itself subject to something of a bidding war between Take-Two and EA, with the latter eventually purchasing the studio. The partnership produced only one rally racer, that being 2023’s EA Sports WRC.
Earlier this month, EA announced it would be “pausing” development on future rally racing games, and the X account of developer Codemasters was also scrubbed, leading to fears that the developer had been shut down.
It was subsequently confirmed that Codemasters had been hit by layoffs, and that some of its staff had been moved away from the studio to work on other in-development EA titles.
We’ll have to wait and see what Nacon’s plans for its WRC games are; we don’t yet know who’s developing the new rally racers, but it sounds like we’ll have to wait until at least 2027 to get our hands on the first post-EA Nacon WRC game.
