Behind the Scenes of Racing Simulator Development

RaceRoom’s development history reflects more than two decades of adaptation within the PC sim racing space.

The studio originally began as SimBin Studios in the early 2000s, producing acclaimed boxed racing simulators such as GTR, GTR 2, and GT Legends. As the PC games market shifted away from retail releases toward digital distribution, the team gradually evolved alongside it. By the late 2000s and early 2010s, titles like RACE 06 and RACE 07 were already embracing platforms like Steam, marking an early transition toward the digital-first ecosystem that would soon dominate PC gaming.

That shift ultimately led to the creation of RaceRoom Racing Experience, launched in 2013 as a free-to-download racing simulation designed as a long-term live platform rather than a traditional boxed product. 

To learn more about the past, present, and future of what it takes to build a successful racing simulation, we spoke with Jean-François Chardon, Head of KW Studios Sweden, about the company's evolution.

RaceRoom has a fascinating history. Can you take us through this evolution? What were the pivotal moments, challenges, and strategic decisions that shaped the company’s journey?

Jean-François Chardon: RaceRoom’s development history is a story of adaptation. SimBin started in the early 2000s, making boxed PC simulators like GTR, GTR 2, and GT Legends. I joined the team in 2010, at a time when RACE 06 and RACE 07 were among the pioneers and some of the first racing simulations to fully embrace Steam as a distribution platform. Even then, the studio was already adapting to the shift away from physical PC retail releases toward digital-only distribution.

The idea behind RaceRoom was to go all-in on accessibility and build a freely downloadable racing simulator that anyone could try, while also creating opportunities for KW Automotive partners to reach a highly targeted audience of motorsport enthusiasts. We experimented early with large-scale events and marketing activations where all content was temporarily available for free, which helped us understand player behavior and engagement in a live-service environment.

RaceRoom launched in 2013 as a long-term platform rather than a one-off product. The decision to make it free-to-download was risky and controversial, but it allowed us to continuously evolve the simulation instead of resetting every few years with new boxed releases. That choice also introduced some early missteps: in an attempt to appeal to a broader audience, we experimented with separate “amateur” and “realistic” physics models, something the simracing community very clearly rejected. That feedback was an important course correction and reinforced what our core audience actually valued.

The restructuring into Sector3 Studios in 2014 gave the team a much clearer focus on hardcore simracing. Since then, RaceRoom has been developed and maintained by a relatively small, highly experienced team, with an emphasis on long-term iteration, authenticity, and continuous improvement – a mindset that still defines how we approach the project today at KW Studios.

SimBin’s original team started as a modding community for F1 2002 before becoming one of the most respected racing simulation developers. How did those early modding roots influence the studio’s philosophy toward racing simulation authenticity?

Jean-François Chardon: The original SimBin team came from a modding background, and that DNA is still very present today, especially in our art team. Our track artists come directly from the modding scene. It’s a great place to make yourself known, and it remains a talent pool that most simulation studios actively look at.

Of course, modding and professional development are very different realities. As a modder, you can spend as much time as you want refining a piece of content. Once it becomes your job, you have to work within budgets and timelines, and sometimes release content even if you’d still like to push it further.

This is where RaceRoom’s nature as a long-term, free-to-download online platform actually connects back to those modding roots. Because there is no hard “end” to the product, we can continuously improve and revisit our content. We regularly update tracks when real-world venues change, rather than freezing them in time. A good example is the Nordschleife, where we were the first simulation to feature the controversial new “killer” curb shortly after it appeared in real life.

We prioritize authenticity, avoid shortcuts that break immersion, and work closely with real drivers, racing teams, and KW engineering. Those core principles still guide how we develop RaceRoom today, even as technology, tools, and market conditions continue to evolve.

Building authentic racing simulators requires solving extraordinary technical challenges. What are the most complex technical problems your team has had to solve over the years? 

Jean-François Chardon: Some of the biggest technical challenges are still ahead of us. RaceRoom is built on technology that dates back many years, including a DirectX 9-based renderer, and modernizing that foundation is one of our most urgent and complex tasks. Doing so while maintaining a live product, supporting existing players, and working within the realities of a relatively small team and budget is a significant challenge – but one we’re actively tackling. The motivation and experience of the team are what make me confident we’ll get there.

Beyond long-term engine work, the reality of running a racing simulator is that technical challenges are constant and often interconnected. On any given day, that might mean resolving backend or multiplayer issues, fixing reference data on a car or track, responding to urgent partner or licensing requirements, or ensuring performance remains acceptable across a wide range of PC hardware.

What makes simulation development particularly complex is that no system exists in isolation – physics, force feedback, audio, AI, multiplayer, and rendering all influence one another. Balancing simulation accuracy with stability, performance, and accessibility is an ongoing process rather than a problem you ever fully “solve.” That long-term, iterative mindset has defined how we’ve approached RaceRoom for many years.

RaceRoom launched with a free-to-play model in 2013, which was controversial at the time and remains debated today. Would you make the same choice today, or has your thinking evolved?

Jean-François Chardon: The decision to adopt a free-to-play model in 2013 came from a simple question: how do you grow a niche genre like sim racing while also giving our automotive partners meaningful ways to reach an audience of motorsport enthusiasts? Making RaceRoom freely accessible removed a lot of friction and allowed players to discover whether sim racing was even for them before committing financially.

The upside has been increased reach and longevity. The downside is perception... some players still judge the experience based solely on the free starter content rather than the full breadth of what RaceRoom offers. That’s something we’re now addressing by expanding the amount and quality of free content available on the platform in the near future.

Looking back, the model worked for us, but it required constant adjustment and learning. If we were starting today, we might design certain aspects differently, but the core idea of lowering the entry barrier while offering depth for committed players still makes sense for our activities and the audience we serve.

How do you approach balancing free content to attract players versus paid content to sustain the business? 

Jean-François Chardon: As an online service, we have access to a lot of data and insight into player behaviour. I’m personally very interested in digging into that data to identify patterns. For example, the type of content players enjoy in competitive online racing can be very different from what they prefer to drive against A.I., and that can directly inform how we position free versus paid content or build our multiplayer schedule.

We look closely at metrics such as conversion rates, retention, session length, and which cars or tracks actually keep players engaged over time. Some of the results can be somewhat surprising. For example, I see a conversion rate among players using gamepads, or even just a mouse and keyboard, that is higher than I would have guessed. Sim racing is often associated with high-end hardware, but the data shows that many players can still enjoy and commit to the experience without it.

Finding players in 2026 is not particularly difficult, thanks to the continued growth of the Steam audience. The bigger challenge is visibility and convincing players to spend meaningful time in the sim once they try it.

One noticeable change over the years is how much less fragmented the sim racing audience has become. In the past, communities were very compartmentalized, with players strongly identifying as “GTR2 players” or “rFactor players,” and rarely crossing over. Today, most players move fluidly between different simulations. As many titles have reached a similar level of feature maturity, players are more open to enjoying multiple platforms, which changes how we think about onboarding, retention, and long-term engagement.

How does RaceRoom build and maintain its racing community? What specific strategies, features, or initiatives have been most effective at keeping drivers engaged long-term?

Jean-François Chardon: What has proven most effective is giving players clear goals and reasons to come back. Ranked racing, competitions tied to real-world series, and regular content updates all contribute to that. We also stay very close to the community through Discord, which provides a direct and continuous feedback channel.

When it comes to measuring community health, we look beyond simple concurrent player numbers. Retention over time, game modes’ popularity, participation in competitions, and how players react to updates are much better indicators for us. A smaller but engaged and constructive community is ultimately healthier than a few large but short-lived spikes.

Partnerships also play an important role. Working closely with racing series, manufacturers, and KW Automotive partners allows us to connect sim racing with real- world motorsport in ways that feel meaningful rather than superficial. In many cases, RaceRoom competitions have led to real-world racing opportunities being offered as prizes.

Racing simulation is a unique market with specific player expectations around authenticity, licensing, and physics. Do you believe there’s a sustainable moat or competitive advantage in RaceRoom’s business model?

Jean-François Chardon: One feature that often gets mentioned as being unique to RaceRoom is our leaderboard challenge mode. We know we have a large audience of time-attack enthusiasts who enjoy how this mode works and how tightly it’s integrated into the overall experience.

That said, I don’t think RaceRoom’s competitive advantage comes down to a single feature. Being free to download certainly gives us an edge, as we are often the first sim racing title players get to try, but that alone isn’t a sustainable moat.

What really differentiates RaceRoom is adaptability. We are a relatively small team with a very high level of experience, and that allows us to react quickly to B2B requirements. We can reprioritize, iterate, and sometimes push meaningful changes within hours rather than weeks. Most of the team at KW Studios has been working on racing simulations for decades, and there is a strong sense of ownership across all disciplines.

That combination of institutional knowledge, short decision paths, and long-term commitment makes it difficult to replicate what we’ve built. Features can be copied, but the ability to continuously improve, adapt to new market realities, and care deeply about the product over many years is much harder to reproduce.

How do you view RaceRoom’s positioning relative to competitors like Forza, Gran Turismo, Assetto Corsa, and iRacing? 

Jean-François Chardon: Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport are extremely high-quality products, with a strong focus on progression, accessibility, and presentation. I think it’s a mistake to assume that console and PC players have fundamentally different expectations. Historically, the real separator has been hardware and usage environments rather than player desires.

That separation is fading. We’re seeing more AAA cross-platform releases, Microsoft’s push toward a unified Xbox and PC ecosystem, and the emergence of platforms like SteamOS. This is an area I’m personally very interested in, as it will open a new console environment much friendlier to small studios, without all the proprietary headaches that tend to lead to lengthy additional development time, and sometimes... bad ports. We’ve already made improvements to RaceRoom’s user experience on Steam Deck, and making RaceRoom run flawlessly on SteamOS is something we’re actively exploring. What I will be curious about is which hardware manufacturers will jump in and provide drivers for the SteamOS platform.

Within the PC sim racing space, each title tends to have its own angle. iRacing focuses heavily on a subscription-based competitive infrastructure, Assetto Corsa thrives on modding and sandbox freedom, and RaceRoom sits somewhere in between, with structured racing, official content, and a free-to-download entry point.

We don’t assume players will choose only one sim. Today, many drivers move fluidly between platforms depending on the experience they’re looking for. Our goal isn’t to be everything to everyone, but to make RaceRoom strong and distinctive enough to earn a consistent place in that rotation.

You’ve built an interesting B2B business beyond consumer gaming. How significant is this B2B revenue stream relative to consumer sales?

Jean-François Chardon: The B2B side of RaceRoom is an important complement to our consumer business. It includes experiential marketing, brand activations, and simulator installations in many different parts of the world. Over the years, we’ve partnered with brands across a variety of sectors, from automotive and motorsport to energy drinks and consumer electronics.

A good illustration of this approach is the RaceRoom café at the Nürburgring Boulevard. Anyone can walk in and experience sim racing alone or as a group, using high-end hardware they might not have access to at home. It’s a very tangible way of connecting simulation with real-world motorsport culture.

RaceRoom also operates as part of a broader ecosystem alongside sister companies like Ascher and Tracktime, which provide top-of-the-line hardware solutions. This allows us to deliver complete event or activation projects, whether on-site or online, without relying heavily on external suppliers.

In pure revenue terms, consumer sales remain the core of the business, but B2B provides diversification, stability, and visibility. It also gives us the opportunity to work on interesting technical and experiential challenges that sometimes feed directly back into the consumer product.

Looking ahead to 2026 and beyond, what’s the roadmap for RaceRoom? Is there room for growth, or is this a mature market with established players fighting for share?

Jean-François Chardon: Looking toward 2026 and beyond, our priorities are clear. Technical modernization remains a major focus, but we are no longer pursuing a move to Unreal Engine. That is something we had tried in 2015 and an idea we entertained a tad too long. For our specific needs, it would require a much larger team and budget to do properly, and the trade-offs no longer make sense for us.

Instead, we have been steadily improving our own rendering engine over the past couple of years, with significant gains in both visual quality and performance. This gives us some solid breathing room, allowing the title to remain visually relevant while we work on deeper architectural changes to modernize the engine and remove long-standing constraints such as DirectX 9.

Updating the graphics API alone would not result in immediate visual breakthroughs, but it would unlock access to more modern techniques and allow us to use today’s hardware far more efficiently. That kind of foundational work is critical for the long-term sustainability of the platform.

At the same time, we continue to expand content in a targeted way while refining core systems such as physics, ranked multiplayer, and onboarding. Growing the player base cannot happen without improving the user experience, better presenting the immense amount of content we already offer, and adding features that increase enjoyment and long-term retention.

More broadly, I don’t see sim racing as a stagnant or declining genre. It is mature, but still evolving. Hardware advances and closer links between real-world motorsport and simulation continue to create new opportunities. The real challenge isn’t chasing growth at any cost but evolving carefully and responsibly while meeting the expectations of a knowledgeable and passionate audience.

Jean-François Chardon, Head of KW Studios Sweden

Interview conducted by the 80 Level Editorial Team