Why NASCAR 25 will not be on PS4 and Xbox One

It has been nearly 12 years since the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One were launched to the world in a bitter console war.

But, thanks in part to the pandemic, inflation and prior supply constraints, pick up for the current PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S devices was slow to begin. With supply now being plentiful for a number of years, and particularly strong PS5 sales (over 77 million), many game developers are switching off support for older consoles.

This is true for official racing games of motorsport series, such as EA SPORTS F1 25 and Monster Energy Supercross 25. This time to upgrade from eighth to ninth generation consoles is now.

Yet, we see at Traxion many comments about players still wanting to have new games on the now positively ancient PS4 and Xbox One devices.

NASCAR 25 will not be released on these either, and according to producer Matt Lewis, for good reason too:

“I know there’s going to be some PS4 guys that are upset by that, but here’s sort of the harsh reality, which is [that] those consoles are 12 years old at this point, and there’s some opportunity cost, right?

“So if we had supported the old consoles, you got to take a group of people, take them off the project, put them solely on the job of making the game compatible with the old consoles. That means down-res-ing textures, that means doing some graphical things to make it run right on those platforms.

“That and taking away resources that could be doing something else on the next-gen consoles.

“At the end of the day, you could split it and have two totally diverging paths. But, it makes it less efficient, it makes it slower, it makes it more difficult to develop in the future, because now you’ve got two code bases that start to diverge.”

The developer of NASCAR 25, Monster Games which is owned by iRacing, did make its most-recent game, Wold of Outlaws: Dirt Racing ‘24 for the older PlayStation and Xbox Devices.

When iRacing purchased the NASCAR gaming rights off Motorsport Games back in 2023, the market was a little different, but the licencing deal does include all PlayStation and Xbox devices, plus strangely mobile and Switch platforms too – although there’s no word if iRacing will ever actually create something for these platforms.

NASCAR 25 is expected to be released at the end of September or early October this year, with nearly 190 official drivers, laser-scanned tracks, four official series and a lengthy career mode.