Project CARS 3 will be delisted in August 2025

Welcome to 2025: the PlayStation 1 games you badgered your parents to buy for Christmas 30 years ago may still be sitting in the attic, fully playable, while digital games you bought just five years back can be switched off and delisted without warning. The latest example is the unfortunate Project CARS 3.

Project CARS 3 delisting dates and online services

This week, the game's Steam, PlayStation and Xbox store listings were updated with unwelcome news: it will be removed at the end of August. The official statement on the Project CARS 3 Steam page reads:

"Update on PROJECT CARS 3. All product sales will end on: August 24th, 2025 23:59 UTC. Please note that times may vary by region. If you bought the game digitally it will remain in your library and can be redownloaded in the future. Any DLCs purchased before August 24th, 2025 23:59 UTC will still be available to use after this date. The game’s online modes will also remain active until February 24th, 2026."

This is not a one-off, as you may well recall. Its predecessors, Project CARS 1 and 2, were both pulled from digital shops in 2022, much to our frustration.

Why racing games disappear from digital stores

The explanation comes down to licensing. Games of this kind use official licences for vehicles and tracks from manufacturers and circuits, but only for a set period. Once those agreements run out, the rights holders can no longer legally feature them in a product being sold commercially. Publishers therefore remove the games from sale.

Keeping online features live costs money, too. Multiplayer servers and leaderboards, as well as user-generated content such as car liveries and tuning setups, all need continuing server capacity. This leaves publishers and developers in a difficult position, since the active audience for most games eventually falls to a small but dedicated group. These committed community members are naturally the most vocal when a beloved game is suddenly delisted or features such as online play are removed.

In practical terms, you have under a month to add Project CARS 3 to your library, or miss the chance for good. After that, there will be a year and a half to race online before the game becomes an offline-only title.

Project CARS 3's divisive change in direction

To be fair, this is not the harshest setback racing fans have endured, as Project CARS 3 was some distance from a classic. The 2020 third entry arrived during a turbulent spell for developer Slightly Mad Studios: it was acquired by F1 developer Codemasters, which EA then acquired itself soon afterwards. What had previously been a realism-led racing series shifted towards sim-cade territory.

Its handling model made a sharp move towards something far more accessible and forgiving. The career mode structure appeared to have borrowed heavily from Race Driver: GRID. Put simply, it resembled Codemasters' own GRID titles to an oddly confusing degree. For Project CARS loyalists, that was more than a little disappointing.

Still, there is little point dwelling on that while the game is heading for the exit. Instead, it is worth noting that you can secure it for posterity for the modest, ahem, £49.99, before it returns to the primordial digital ooze where games go when they die.