Is the racing simulator genre becoming irrelevant on 3rd party side? I know I didn't bring burnout paradise since that's arcade . Is this a good purchase by take two?

The Dirt games are hit and miss. They release too many. D5 looks great though.

Because no one really cares about Codemasters.

I don't really care about them, and in the end taketwon is a third party as well so no one is worried it may skip one console or the other.

Because nobody cares?

They do racing games and that's about it. Not even particularly successful racing games either. They're like AA at best.

Impressed they lasted this long tbh. 34 years on their own. They were never THE studio for the best racing games. Just hit and miss. The odd times they published games outside of racing was often terrible. Bullet Witch. Overlord on Wii. Bodycount. Some others were at least mediocre. Codemasters is a poster boy studio you expected to go out in the 7th gen or get bought by EA or 2K a decade ago.

Sucks to lose the independence of yet another publisher, but this is probably not a very big loss.

During the early PS360 gen Codies racers were imo the best in the genre. But they lost the magical touch they had with GRID, and DiRT has been far too content-light recently, not to mention iterated to dullness. I buy them eventually, but never day one any more.

I'm very wary about Codies being bought up though; there must be a serious risk of one or two Codies sequels bombing and then the various development teams being picked apart, dissolved, and the name ultimately being dropped. Then it's goodbye to yet another 30+ year old dev.

Realistic racing games aren't really popular outside of the first party ones, so it's no wonder there's not that much fuss about this buyout. Still, it's sad to see how small-medium studios are being gobbled up by big publishers, after a decade or so we won't have A or AA development, it will be either indie or AAA.

Remember them mostly from the game genie, and that was not so fun.