Steam's Secretly Biggest Driving Game Ever is Coming to PS5 in 2 Weeks

3 hours ago 3

Published Oct 5, 2026, 10:46 AM EDT

Oli Welsh has been covering the business and culture of video games for two decades. He started out writing for Edge and other publications (specializing in MMOs and Blizzard, as cover for his World of Warcraft playtime) before joining Eurogamer, where he worked for 14 years as reviews editor, deputy editor, and editor-in-chief; Eurogamer won many Games Media Awards during his tenure. At Polygon, he writes about film and TV as well as games, and provides news, analysis, and criticism on the entertainment we love and the industries that make it, all from his home in London. He loves role-playing, racing, puzzles, tactics, exploration, storytelling, Nintendo, mysteries, spies, fantasy, reality, cars, and classic cinema. He wanted to be a movie critic when he grew up, and now he’s definitely grown up, and occasionally is one. He considers this a win.

And if you're not a Steam simulator fan, you might never have heard of it

A muscle car powers along a road among canyons

Pop quiz: What's going to be this year's biggest racing game on PlayStation 5? Will it be Forza Horizon 6? In theory, yes — although Playground Games is leaving it rather late to confirm a promised 2026 release date. Will it be Star Wars: Galactic Racer? It's brilliant, but probably not.

In fact, there's a third contender you might not have heard of, but which is certain to be a huge deal when it arrives on PS5 on Oct. 19. It's a car simulation sandbox called BeamNG.drive, and it might be the most realistic driving game ever made.

BeamNG.drive is Steam's most realistic driving game ever

BeamNG.drive has been available on Steam in early access for over 10 years. In that time, it has quietly become massively popular. It has over 200,000 "overwhelmingly positive" reviews on Steam, and is estimated to have sold between 8 and 15 million copies. Its audience has built slowly but steadily over time and recently hit a peak of 47,424 concurrent players.

The secret to the game's success is an outstanding soft-body physics model which allows for extremely realistic car behavior and crash physics. You won't find licensed cars in BeamNG.drive, but there's a huge variety of vehicles and landscapes that you can do almost anything you can imagine with.

There are 12 open-world environments, all available in free roam. There are activities like time trials, circuit races, rock crawling, police chases, trucking delivery missions, drifting, rallying, gymkhana, free roam missions, and more. You can tweak the weather and even gravity to experiment with what developer BeamNG's peerless physics engine can do.

But is it actually a game? Increasingly, yes. Over time, BeamNG.drive has acquired a career mode with progression, a suite of driving scenarios, and a proper tutorial for the free roam mode. Although it's still in early access, and probably will be forever, BeamNG.drive is definitely ready to find a new audience on PS5. Playground Games had better move fast with that Forza Horizon 6 port...

Free sign-up