More than a decade after its release, the original Assetto Corsa still has a Steam player base roughly twelve times larger than Assetto Corsa EVO. The gap reflects EVO’s current challenge, but also the unusual longevity of the game it is supposed to succeed.
Assetto Corsa officially launched in December 2014. Assetto Corsa EVO arrived on Steam in January 2025.
As of August 16, 2026, the original Assetto Corsa has averaged 8,572 concurrent players over the last 30 days. Assetto Corsa EVO sits at 689, giving the older game roughly 12.4 times as many average players.
In July, the respective figures were 8,809 and 763. The historical numbers make the comparison more unusual.
Assetto Corsa averaged 917 concurrent players in December 2014, the month of its full release. In January 2016, it was still at 916. By January 2019, the average had risen to just under 2,000.
In January 2026, more than 11 years after launch, it averaged 10,684 concurrent players. Assetto Corsa is therefore attracting substantially more players now than it did during its first years.
For EVO, that creates an unusual succession problem. Kunos is not trying to revive interest in Assetto Corsa. It has to convince an active community to move away from something many players are still using every day.
Assetto Corsa became more than its original content
The Assetto Corsa available to players in 2026 is very different from the package Kunos released in 2014.
More than a decade of mods, applications, servers and community-created content now sits around the original simulator. Players have access to cars and circuits outside the official catalogue, traffic servers, free-roam maps, historic racing, community championships and extensive graphical modifications.
That makes EVO’s job harder than replacing the content of a normal predecessor.
It is competing with more than ten years of accumulated community content and established workflows.
Players may already have large car and track libraries, preferred applications, graphical configurations, servers and championships built around the original game.
Moving to EVO therefore means more than changing graphics engines. For some users, it means giving up parts of an established setup that currently has no direct replacement.
EVO also demands more from the PC
Hardware creates another barrier.
The original Assetto Corsa was designed for significantly older PCs and still runs on relatively modest systems.
Assetto Corsa EVO belongs to a newer hardware generation. Its official minimum requirements include 16GB of RAM, SSD storage and substantially newer graphics hardware.
Many Assetto Corsa players already use powerful PCs for VR, triple-screen setups and demanding graphical modifications, so hardware requirements do not affect everyone equally. But the entry cost remains lower for the original game.
For some players, moving to EVO may involve a hardware upgrade as well as buying the game. In sim racing, that expense competes with wheelbases, pedals, cockpits, displays and VR equipment.
EVO is still in Early Access
The player figures are not a comparison between two finished products.
Assetto Corsa EVO remains in Early Access.
The game has changed substantially since its January 2025 launch, with additional cars, circuits, multiplayer functionality and technical improvements arriving through updates.
Kunos has also started working on tools intended to support creators. That may be particularly important because community content is one of the main reasons the original Assetto Corsa has remained active for so long.
A successor cannot reproduce a decade of third-party content immediately. Creator tools still need documentation, adoption and time before they can support anything close to the ecosystem surrounding the original game.
EVO has been publicly available for less than two years. Assetto Corsa has had more than a decade to accumulate content and infrastructure.
EVO’s recent player numbers are still declining
Early Access explains why EVO remains incomplete, but it does not explain away its recent player trend.
The game averaged 1,015 concurrent players in April 2026. That fell to 893 in May, 782 in June and 763 in July.
Over the latest 30-day period, the average has dropped again to 689, around 10% below July.
The original Assetto Corsa has also declined during the same period, from 9,346 average players in June to 8,809 in July and 8,572 over the latest 30 days.
The difference is scale. EVO does not need to overtake its predecessor while it remains in Early Access. It does, however, need major updates to give players reasons to return.
At the moment, thousands of people playing the original Assetto Corsa have not moved permanently to EVO.
Assetto Corsa grew years after release
Assetto Corsa’s historical Steam numbers show how unusual its lifecycle has been.
In October 2016, it averaged 1,070 concurrent players. In October 2019, that had increased to 1,982. By October 2022, the average was 6,489. In October 2024, it reached 8,946. Its highest concurrent player peak recorded by Steam Charts came in December 2025, when Assetto Corsa reached 20,019 simultaneous players.
That happened almost 11 years after the full release and nearly a year after Assetto Corsa EVO entered Early Access. The original game did not simply retain its launch audience. Its active Steam population grew substantially over time. That means EVO may not replace Assetto Corsa in the conventional sense.
The two could coexist for years, with players using each for different purposes. EVO could become technically more advanced while the original remains useful because of its content, mods and established multiplayer communities.
Kunos is competing with years of accumulated habit
Assetto Corsa gives EVO a large potential audience, but that audience already has a working simulator.
The original has their cars, tracks, mods, servers, graphical configurations and championships. It runs on comparatively accessible hardware, and more than a decade of community knowledge exists around configuring and troubleshooting it.
That is the immediate challenge facing EVO. The current gap of 8,572 average players to 689 does not prove that EVO has failed. One is an Early Access title still under development; the other is one of the longest-lived PC racing simulators.
The numbers do show how difficult the transition will be.
Assetto Corsa became successful enough that replacing it is now unusually difficult.
Kunos does not only need to make EVO better in individual areas. It needs to give existing Assetto Corsa users enough reasons to rebuild the libraries, configurations and habits they have accumulated over more than a decade.
Until then, the original Assetto Corsa remains the much larger game on Steam.
If you do not own the game yet, Assetto Corsa EVO is available on PC, and the original Assetto Corsa Ultimate Edition remains the reference point for what a mature modding scene looks like.
This website uses affiliate links which may earn a commission at no additional cost to you.
