Codemasters Acquires the WRC License in Five-Year Deal

Codemasters Acquires the WRC License in Five-Year Deal

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Richard Walker

While Codemasters works away on DiRT 5, the developer has acquired the rights to make games using the FIA World Rally Championship license. To date, Milestone and Kylotonn Games have handled development on the WRC series, with the latter set to release WRC 9 this September.

The new five-year deal will allow Codemasters to release WRC titles for console, PC and mobile, with annual entries that will run from 2023 to 2027. The UK studio will also handle WRC eSports tournaments, while remaining committed to the DiRT series, the next of which is due this October.

"The DiRT Rally team is already working on their next project ahead of the WRC agreement in 2023,' Codemasters told GamesIndustry.biz, with the first Codies WRC game to land during its financial year ending March 2024. The WRC license will be joining Codemasters' official F1 license, with F1 2020 coming in July.

Comments
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  • Wish it was a 3-year deal with a extension option. It's one thing to finalize a deal for a great game, a whole other thing to stake your claim on exclusive rights for what will likely be the majority of the next generation. Yeah I known these deals are donut all the time in the industry but it sux when for example, EA has the rights to publish Star Wars games for a decade and it takes nearly that long for them to make a single decent one when half that time would have given another big publisher a shot.
  • But isn't this, in a way, a bit of Codemasters cannibalizing themselves? Meaning, they're developing two rally style racing games to compete with each other and their customer base. EA made this mistake when they'd release Battlefield, Medal of Honor, and Titanfall within the same time frame window of each other. Now two of three series are shelved for the foreseeable future.
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