Random thought of the day. What will become of the racing genre when the inevitable revolution of self driving cars happened? I'm talking about 10-20 years from now of course. When most people will not drive on their own anymore and very few of them will even have a license to drive themselves.

Will the racing genre become even more niche because there isn't really any passion connecting people to cars anymore? Will it maybe have a big revival because of its novel concept of driving yourself?

I don't really see it as having much of an effect on Racing games tbh. Certainly not circuit racing games. Even games like Need For Speed though... in a world of self-driving cars 'Street Racers' won't be using them.

GTA though, that's a game that might change!

Where will street racers come from when every child is brought up without ever learning how to drive? To appreciate driving cars you would first have to drive a car. Expect the sentence "Why would I ever want to steer a car myself?" become an actual thing in the future.

Maybe it won't change much because it's already a pretty small genre.

You think that in 10-20 years either we will all be able to have extremely high-tech machinery or that we will all be forced to use public ones without beeing compensated for the cars we bought?

Sad to say that that future you envision is not in any way likely to happen anytime in the next decades, so theres nothing to worry about.

First & third person shooters still seem to be popular although the majority of gamers has no gun license or fought in a war...

You don't seem to realize how fast this industry is progressing. The first self driving cars without any manual steering are expected to happen as soon as in 3 years. The biggest thing that currently keeps the revolution back is politics and not technology. The technology is already pretty ready.

Mankind always strives for comfort, it's the main driver of innovation. Public car services will be the main accelerator for the revolution as it is big business. Affordable mainstream cars will soon follow. It's not as if people will suddenly sell their own cars and switch to automated ones. They will simply fade out as younger people will have to decide between automated and manual driving and we all know what the majority will choose there.

In 10 years we will have self driving cars as a normal part of regular traffic both public and private. In 20 years there will be a lot of young people who own a car but will never have learned how to drive manually. In 30 years automated cars will easily make up the majority of all vehicles.

Good point. Though killing people is basically a biological urge of humans while driving cars is not.

There's a difference between dirving normally and racing. Driving normally is routine and doesn't have that much spectacle per se, but driving is a fast-paced sport. People's interests still would be enough for the genre to exist, I don't even think it would suffer from automatic driving, tbh. If we somehow invented automatic robots that played football for us, would that make FIFA obsolete and make people stop buying them? I don't think so.

I don't think that with the advent of self-driving cars people are going to not be able to comprehend the enjoyment behind driving a car themselves. People will still be able to understand why Driving and Drifting a vehicle around at 130mph through a city while being chased by cops might be fun.

Most people have never piloted a plane, only been a passenger in one, they can still understand how piloting a plane in a game can be fun.

Not to mention Motorsports like Formula One, Nascar etc won't be going anywhere.

They could add pedestrians in racing games. ;)