iRacing Acquires Monster Games

If picking up one racing game developer before Christmas wasn’t enough, then why not grab two, as iRacing acquires Monster Games just days after they announced the acquisition of Orontes Games.

The plan for both developers is for them to continue as standalone development studios working on their own projects, while the iRacing dev team remains focused on their own racing sim. But there’s a benefit to sharing resources across the three companies, along with potentially integrating technology and skills in both directions.

And that should be easy for Monster Games, whose President and owner, Rich Garcia, worked with iRacing CEO and CTO Dave Kaemmer at Papyrus Racing. And given that the former company has most recently worked on the Tony Stewart’s Sprint Racing Game and earlier entries in the NASCAR Heat series, there’s some crossover with the oval side of iRacing.

“We are really pleased to be able to share this news, it’s been in the works for some time now,” said iRacing president Tony Gardner. “Rich and his team are a proven studio with unique skills that will really add to our already fantastic team here at iRacing. We’ll be able to add a lot to MGI’s products as well in the long run, to include assets, graphics, technologies and physics. We see a tremendous amount of synergies that we can take advantage of between the studios,” Gardner continued. “That being said, our core strategy, values and culture will remain intact – to build the most realistic and best racing games possible.”

“Rich and I worked together for many years at Papyrus, with great success,” added Kaemmer. “We are at a point as a company that we are comfortable building out these two new teams to explore the broader racing game market to ultimately funnel serious sim racers to our flagship product iRacing on the PC. Rich and the Monster team will be an important part of that strategy as we use our code and experience to bring their games to another level. I am very excited to be working with Rich again, as well as the extremely talented team at Monster Games.”

“I’m really excited for the future of Monster Games and iRacing,” said Garcia. “To be working with my longtime friend and colleague Dave once again is awesome. Our studios will really complement each other’s and I fully expect to see positive impacts on both products. To now have tools and resources, and quite frankly time, to build these games and to do it with the leading racing simulation company in the marketplace is beyond exciting for me.  I can’t wait to get started!”

Monster Games will apparently continue development on a currently unannounced project, with the aim of a release later in 2022. And will then use the technolgy and content shared between iRacing, Orontes and Monster for future games.

It’s an interesting move, and might have been inspired by the number of acquisitions made by Motosport Games (who have now taken over the NASCAR Heat series, and most recently released NASCAR 21: Ignition).

You can follow our previous coverage of Monster Games titles, here, including SRX: The Game and Tony Stewart’s Sprint Car.

And you can sign up to iRacing, here (and credit your referral to ORD, which we’d appreciate!). And see all vehicles included in your basic subscription, or what you can access by paying more, in our full official iRacing car list, here. Or check out all of the included circuits, and the others you can buy, in our full official iRacing track list, here. And keep up with all the latest iRacing news, updates and eSports, here.