RENNSPORT is still running cash-prize esports, developing new content, operating across PC and consoles and now self-publishing on every platform. Meanwhile, its visible Steam audience is remarkably small. The €10,000 R1 prize pool is not really the mystery. Everything around it is.
RENNSPORT is in an unusual position.
At the time of writing, SteamDB showed RENNSPORT with just 20 concurrent players, a 24-hour peak of 25 and an all-time Steam peak of only 306.
At the same time, RENNSPORT has started another season of R1, its flagship esports championship, culminating in an in-person final at SimRacing Expo with a €10,000 prize pool split across 12 teams.
That leaves one obvious question: who is still paying for all of this?
The €10,000 is not the strange part
Ten thousand euros is not an extraordinary amount of money in the marketing budget of a commercial video game. On its own, it tells us very little.
RENNSPORT also comes from an era when the numbers involved in its esports programme were dramatically larger.
When ESL R1 launched in 2023, ESL FACEIT Group officially announced a collective €500,000 prize pool across that year’s two seasons.
RENNSPORT’s tournament at the 2025 Esports World Cup carried a $500,000 prize pool.
Those figures should not be interpreted as Competition Company personally writing a €500,000 or $500,000 cheque. Those competitions were part of much larger externally backed esports operations.
R1 in 2026 is different.
The current series sits directly inside the RENNSPORT ecosystem and its prize fund has fallen to €10,000. That is dramatically less money, but it arrives while the sim’s publicly visible Steam audience remains exceptionally small.
The prize fund is therefore interesting, even if it is probably one of the cheapest parts of the operation.
Running RENNSPORT costs more than €10,000
RENNSPORT is more than a server hosting a handful of drivers.
Competition Company continues to operate a game across PC, PlayStation and Xbox, with cross-platform multiplayer, online infrastructure, licensed vehicles and circuits, DLC, esports and continued development.
The official RENNSPORT website still lists additional DLC releases targeted for 2026.
On 12 August, RENNSPORT also launched another PlayStation promotion, cutting the PS5 Deluxe Edition by 45%, the Standard Edition by 20% and its DLC by 15%.
Following the insolvency of former publishing partner Nacon, Competition Company has also taken responsibility for publishing RENNSPORT itself across its platforms.
In April, the studio described the process as becoming a self-publishing operation across all platforms, including taking digital infrastructure and platform operations in-house.
That shift does not remove costs. It adds responsibilities.
The bigger question is how the entire operation is being financed.
Steam only tells part of the story
There is an important caveat to the Steam numbers.
Saying “RENNSPORT has 20 players” would be misleading. It had roughly that number on Steam at the moment we checked.
RENNSPORT is also available through Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles, and the game supports native crossplay. Player counts from those ecosystems are not publicly visible in the same way as Steam’s data.
There is some evidence that the community may be distributed very differently from what Steam suggests.
In an official RENNSPORT survey published in June, 423 people responded. Among the single-platform responses used in its platform breakdown, 52.5% came from PS5 users, compared with 24.3% from PC and 20.8% from Xbox.
That is not a census of the player base. It was a voluntary community survey and should not be treated as market-share data.
It does, however, show why Steam cannot be used as a proxy for RENNSPORT’s entire audience.
The problem is that we do not have the opposite number either.
Competition Company does not publicly disclose monthly active users across Steam, Epic, PlayStation and Xbox combined.
We know the Steam population is tiny. We do not know how much larger the total RENNSPORT ecosystem actually is.
So who actually owns Competition Company?
The German company behind RENNSPORT is Competition Company GmbH, registered in Munich. Its official legal notice identifies Morris Hebecker as its representative and lists the company under Munich commercial register number HRB 255467.
Publicly indexed German corporate data lists a Swiss company, formerly called KF 15 Suisse AG, as the sole shareholder of Competition Company GmbH.
That Swiss entity was subsequently renamed Competition Company Suisse AG.
Swiss commercial-register information republished by Pappers shows that in January 2025, Competition Company Suisse AG increased its nominal share capital from CHF 172,210 to CHF 266,893 through ordinary and conditional capital increases.
That is an increase of roughly 55%.
The numbers need to be handled carefully.
A CHF 94,683 increase in nominal share capital does not mean that exactly CHF 94,683 was invested into RENNSPORT.
The register does not tell us what investors may have paid above nominal value, whether a share premium was involved, how the capital was ultimately deployed or how much of it was allocated specifically to the game.
Nor does the public information identify every ultimate economic owner behind the Swiss company.
Corporate-data provider Fusionbase, using public shareholder filings, currently marks the ultimate beneficial ownership chain as unresolved.
So the source of the money remains unclear.
RENNSPORT is still behaving like a project expecting to grow
RENNSPORT is not behaving like a game entering maintenance mode.
Competition Company is still releasing DLC, adding free content, working on its AI, addressing console issues, developing community tools, maintaining multiplayer infrastructure and running R1.
Its own development updates continue to describe cars, tracks and technical improvements planned for the remainder of the year.
The move to self-publishing was described by the company as an attempt to build infrastructure capable of supporting RENNSPORT for the long term.
There are several plausible explanations for how that can continue.
The console audience could be substantially larger than Steam suggests. DLC and premium editions may be generating revenue that cannot be observed externally. Commercial agreements, licensing deals, sponsorship and private investment may also contribute to funding the project.
The answer may be some combination of those things. We do not have the numbers required to test it.
Steam may be showing only a small corner of a considerably larger business. RENNSPORT may also remain a long-term bet sustained in part by private capital. The public information does not tell us which explanation is closer to reality.
Until Competition Company publishes player numbers, revenue figures or a clearer picture of its funding structure, the central question remains:
Who is still putting money into RENNSPORT?
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