By this point in the summer, we should probably be talking about F1 26: its new features, how much it has changed compared to last year, and whether it is worth paying full price for yet another entry. Instead, it is August 8, 2026, F1 26 does not exist as a standalone game, and the current Formula 1 season has been running inside F1 25 for more than two months. That makes this a good moment to ask a question that would have sounded almost ridiculous a few years ago: did we really need a new game every season?
Electronic Arts and Codemasters broke with a tradition that had become almost untouchable within the franchise. Rather than replacing F1 25 with a brand-new release, the 2026 season arrived on June 3 through the 2026 Season Pack, a paid expansion that brought the new cars, drivers, teams, regulations and MADRING into the game already on the market.
None of that is particularly new information anymore, and at BoxThisLap we already covered exactly what the 2026 Season Pack included when it launched. What matters now is not repeating its feature list, but looking at what happened afterwards: F1 25 remains the official Formula 1 game, the virtual season has continued, and the absence of a standalone F1 26 has not prevented the title from evolving.
F1 26 Never Arrived, and Nothing Fell Apart
For years, we have almost automatically associated a new season with the need to buy a new game. In the Formula 1 series, every spring used to trigger the same cycle of announcements, trailers, feature reveals and comparisons with the previous entry, eventually ending with another full-price release a few weeks later.
This year has shown us something fairly obvious: in 2026, updating a sports competition no longer requires replacing the entire game. F1 25 received the cars built around the new regulations, Audi, Cadillac, the updated driver line-ups, the revised behaviour of the cars and MADRING without needing a completely separate executable sitting in our libraries.
Codemasters also did not abandon the 2026 season once the expansion was released. EA published versions 1.22 and 1.23 throughout June, followed by the 1.24 update, deployed on July 13 with fixes affecting the 2026 cars, circuits, ERS behaviour and several peripherals. That is exactly the kind of ongoing maintenance we now expect from an active modern game.
So What Would F1 26 Actually Have Been?
This is probably the most uncomfortable question in the whole discussion. If most of what defines the 2026 season could be integrated into F1 25 through an expansion, it is difficult not to wonder how much a hypothetical F1 26 released this summer would really have changed.
Codemasters might have added a few extra features, some interface changes, another game mode or a handful of technical improvements. But looking at the recent history of the series, it is equally plausible that we would have ended up paying full price for a game built on almost exactly the same foundation.
That concern does not come out of nowhere. When we reviewed F1 25 at BoxThisLap, we found genuine improvements over F1 24, particularly in driving feel and certain visual areas, but we also found too many inherited systems, familiar problems and an online experience that had barely evolved. It was a better game than its predecessor, but still a difficult full-price recommendation for players coming directly from recent entries.
A similar discussion had already emerged a year earlier, when we asked whether F1 24 was really what the community had been asking for. The underlying issue had been building for some time: the games were not necessarily bad, but the annual release cycle forced Codemasters to justify a new product even when the differences were becoming increasingly difficult to defend.
Maybe We Have Been Paying for the Calendar
The problem is not exclusive to Formula 1. Sports games have spent decades built around a business model where every new season generates a new product, even when many of the real-world changes mainly involve updated squads, kits, drivers, sponsors, vehicles, stadiums or circuits.
That system made much more sense when a video game arrived on a console and remained largely unchanged for the rest of its life. Large-scale post-launch updates were difficult or sometimes impossible, so buying the next edition was also the practical way to access an up-to-date version of the championship.
The technological reality is completely different today. Games can receive new cars, tracks, regulations, physics changes, competitions and even major systems months after launch, while rosters and statistics can be adjusted several times during the same season. The technical ability to keep a sports game alive for longer than a year has existed for a long time; the commercial model built around annual releases has simply taken much longer to change.
That Does Not Make the Season Pack a Gift
It is important not to confuse the argument here. I may find the 2026 model more sensible than another annual release, but the Season Pack is still paid content. EA officially set a recommended price of €29.99 on console and €24.99 on PC for existing F1 25 owners, so nobody is giving away a full season update out of goodwill.
The useful comparison is not between paying and not paying, but between paying for a season expansion and paying the price of an entirely new game built on a very similar foundation. If the necessary changes can be properly integrated into the existing product, the first option is much easier to justify than forcing the commercial cycle to restart every twelve months.
There is also a less obvious advantage: keeping the same game avoids unnecessarily fragmenting the community. Every annual release leaves some players behind on the previous version while others immediately move to the new one, which becomes particularly problematic in titles whose online modes already struggle to keep certain categories and events populated.
The Real Test Starts Now
There is one important reason not to celebrate this strategy too enthusiastically just yet. Electronic Arts did not present the absence of F1 26 simply as a year off, but as part of a “strategic reset” for the franchise. The company confirmed that F1 25 would represent both the 2025 and 2026 seasons and said the series would return in 2027 with a broader, new experience.
That promise changes the level of expectation considerably. Skipping an annual release makes sense if the additional development time allows Codemasters to address structural problems, rethink systems that have barely moved for years and prepare a leap that would have been difficult to achieve within the usual yearly schedule.
That also means the decision that looks sensible today could easily work against EA in a few months. If the 2027 game arrives with minor changes built around the same structure, familiar menus, an almost identical multiplayer experience and long-standing problems carried over from previous entries, it will be difficult not to ask what that additional year was actually used for.
F1 2027 Can No Longer Be Just “The Next One”
The annual model always came with a convenient excuse: there were barely twelve months between one release and the next. Nobody could reasonably expect a complete technological revolution in that amount of time, especially from a licensed game that also had to follow the calendar, cars, drivers and promotional requirements of a real-world championship.
This time, that explanation will carry far less weight. EA and Codemasters have chosen to extend F1 25 into a second season and have publicly presented 2027 as the beginning of something more ambitious, so the next title will arrive with expectations that a simple change of number on the cover will not be enough to satisfy.
That should mean revisiting the areas where the series has progressed too slowly for too long: the competitive online structure, ranked racing, the experience for wheel users, certain aspects of the physics, artificial intelligence, the interface and, more broadly, all those parts of the game that cannot be solved simply by updating cars and driver line-ups.
In other words, EA has avoided the obligation of selling us F1 26, but in return it has created a much harder obligation for itself: proving that it genuinely needed that extra development time.
Should Other Sports Games Copy This Model?
It would be easy to look at what happened with F1 25 and conclude that every sports game should immediately abandon annual releases, but I do not think the answer needs to be that absolute. There will always be years where a new generation of technology, an engine change, a major physics overhaul or a fundamental redesign of the main modes fully justifies a separate product.
What should disappear is the obligation to release a new game simply because the year on the calendar has changed. If the planned evolution for a season is mainly a content update built on technology that remains perfectly usable, an expansion can be a more sensible option for both the player and the studio.
It could also make new releases meaningful again. Instead of asking every spring which three features are supposed to justify buying almost the same game once more, we could receive new titles when there is actually enough of an evolution to require one.
Two Months Later, the Question Has Changed
When we learned in November 2025 that F1 26 would effectively be replaced by an expansion, the obvious discussion was whether EA was making the right decision and what players would receive in return. As of August 8, 2026, that part of the debate is already behind us: the Season Pack has been released, the current season continues to receive updates, and we now know that a standalone game called F1 26 was not necessary to represent the 2026 championship.
That does not prove that EA’s chosen model is perfect, nor that it should automatically become the future of every sports game. It does show, however, that the apparently unavoidable relationship between a new season and a completely new game was far less inevitable than we had been conditioned to believe.
That is why I am no longer particularly interested in asking where F1 26 is. After more than two months of playing the current season without it, the much more important question is what Codemasters will manage to do with the development time that would previously have been spent putting a 26 on the cover.
You can purchase the base game by clicking here:
F1 26 no longer has anything to prove because it never existed as a standalone game. F1 2027, however, is already under pressure, because after breaking the annual cycle, simply being the next entry will no longer be enough.
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