Competition Company has announced that its new racing sim, Rennsport, has missed a second scheduled milestone on its approach to a late-2023 launch, with its closed beta phase once again postponed.
The closed beta was original scheduled to begin by December 2022, but CC’s CEO Morris Hebecker confirmed in a Discord “talking session” late last year that it had slipped to late January 2023.
However an announcement posted on the game’s official social media channels today — the last possible day of January 2023 — states that this date has again slipped, and apologizes to the game’s fans and those who’ve signed up for the closed beta:
As noted in the announcement, it means that players will be waiting beyond the start of opening weekend of the upcoming €500,000 ESL R1 series. This big-budget event will be staged at one of the largest esports gatherings in the world, IEM Katowice, in Poland in two weeks’ time.
That will see eight of the biggest esports racing teams in the world joined by four giants of esports in general — FaZe, FURIA, Heroic, and MOUZ — and the various teams have been making some big-money signings over the winter.
While the ESL R1 curtain-raiser will be effectively running on the same stable code release as the beta, a compact event of this type only requires a local server (or two) running without any major changes for the duration. A closed beta, even kept to small numbers, needs multiple servers in which lobbies are continually being created and closed, and it appears to be this step up in complexity where Competition Company is being a little more cautious for now.
As things stand, Rennsport is still scheduled for a late-2023 launch, but for the meantime fans will only be able to enjoy it vicariously.
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