EA and Codemasters are skipping a year with their F1 games, right as the sport gets some big rule changes

There’s a bit more excitement than usual, even among veteran car-watchers like me, for next year’s F1 season. You see, the series is bringing in some new rules governing what its cars will look like and how they’ll perform, meaning there’s more potential on paper for serious changes to the established pecking order. Given that, I’m a bit unsure how to feel about EA and Codemasters having announced they’re not making an F1 26, instead skipping ahead to 2027 with a DLC to fill the gap.

Codemasters senior creative director Lee Mather wrote that this this call’s been made as part of “a strategic reset” of the studio’s F1 games, and stresses they and EA are “fully committed” to making F1 games going forwards. That last bit’s probably in light of rally sim fans seeing this announcement and initially thinking ‘oh no, not again’, especially since Codies have released a yearly F1 game since 2010.

Instead of a new game for the first year of these new 2026 regulations, F1 25’ll instead be getting a 2026 season paid DLC, which Mather wrote “will bring players closer to the sport’s major changes for 2026 that includes new cars, sporting regulations, teams, and drivers.” Then, in 2027, there’ll be a new F1 game that’ll “mark the start of a new and more expansive F1 experience”.

On one hand, I’ve been on the side of yearly iterations of sports games often being pointless for years. Unless there are big changes planned, skipping a year and just doing a roster update to the last entry often feels like the better option for all parties except maybe the accountants. F1’s a bit of different bag than ball sports, but taking a year to just see what the new rule changes do to the real world racing could well result in being able to simulate them better without as much of a scramble to react to anything unanticipated right out of the gate could be a similarly good call.

On the other, it’d maybe have made more sense on paper for F1 25, the last year of the current regulations which have been in place since 2022 and a season which has seen many teams skimp on current car development to concentrate on the all-new challenge of 2026, to be the year without a new game. Take a year to really have the developers delve into the new rules, and see if they can nail a fresh sim package and series revamp in time with them. Naturally, that assumes this pause was planned well in advance and hasn’t seen me take into account any factors beyond what sounds good from the outside.

We’ll see how it works out. As of right now, next year will be the first year in a long time I’ll not spend part of digging into a fresh Codemasters racer.