Le Mans Ultimate on PS5 and Xbox ‘at least a year away’ from release

The biggest question for most Le Mans Ultimate fans, other than ‘when is v1.0 coming?’, is undoubtedly ‘when will Le Mans Ultimate be coming to consoles?’

The title’s parent company, Motorsport Games and its CEO Stephen Hood, have been publicly courting PlayStation and Xbox editions since the game’s unveiling – but without publicly committing. Now we know that it definitely will happen, but how is to be decided.

“It won’t be this year. It’s at least a year away,” said Hood to Traxion when asked about console timings.

“For the last few months, we’ve been in active conversation with a lot of developers,” he explains.

“[These are] typical porting houses whose bread and butter is taking challenging projects and moving them from PC format to console.

“And that’s been incredibly insightful for us because not only do we get an understanding of the supposed costs… but we can also see or gain insight into their technical appraisal of what the challenges are,” he ruminates, describing how porting a simulation-heavy game like LMU from PC to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S can be tricky. 

Preparations

Thankfully, most of the back-end work has already been completed, making LMU a much leaner and more wieldy prospect in comparison to its progenitor, rFactor 2:

“A lot of the underlying systems in the game have been rewritten in anticipation of going to console, stripping out stuff that’s not going to work. It’s been a major undertaking, and that’s us just about done now,” he said.

Encouragingly, Motorsport Games already has experience in implementing the technology behind LMU on consoles. Less encouragingly, it was in the form of NASCAR 21: Ignition:

“We know the technology will work; it functioned in the terrible NASCAR Ignition game [NASCAR 21: Ignition, Motorsport Games’ poorly received PC and console racing game], but fundamentally, the physics engine worked, which was always the biggest challenge,” states Hood, acknowledging the difficulty in transferring the company’s physics engine to home consoles while also admitting the failings of Ignition.

Future plans

Intriguingly, Hood offers a glimpse into the direction of future games from MSG: 

“Now we’re looking at instead of financing a console port… we could possibly spin up a console division ourselves, which several months ago would’ve been a completely out of the question,” ruminates Hood.

Motorsport Games’ financial situation is becoming more positive after several rounds of lay-offs, LMU’s positive reception and the recent $2.5million investment by Pimax. 

“But if we have complete control over that, and we own the technology in July [when MSG will make its final payment to Luminis to secure ownership of Studio 397 and the corresponding game engine used in LMU], there’s an opportunity for us to create a very strong sim platform that’s multi-format that we can use for LMU on console… and future projects to come to console as well,” he concluded.

You’d be forgiven for being concerned about MSG aiming to make multiple titles given its failed BTCC, IndyCar and NASCAR games, but the success of Le Mans Ultimate has led to a paradigm shift within the sim racing community. 

Beyond LMU tapping into the lucrative console market, MSG could find itself in a position to develop more racing titles. PlayStation and Xbox users are just going to have to wait a little longer, first, however.