Written by A SteamDB pull cited by Box This Lap (boxthislap.org) shows RENNSPORT running with 20 concurrent players, a 24-hour peak of 25, and an all-time high of 306. Those are LAN party numbers, yet the game just wrapped a competitive season carrying a €10,000 prize pool split across 12 teams and a live final at SimRacing Expo — the same title that ran a $500,000 tournament at the Esports World Cup in 2025 and a €500,000 ESL-backed championship in 2023. That gap between the Steam numbers and the esports prize money is what led Box This Lap, in a report on its site, to dig deeper. The outlet noticed an ad for Moza Racing’s R5 wheel bundle on the game’s product page and started asking who was actually funding the operation.
Current Steam Player Counts for RENNSPORT
Steam Charts and SteamDB are blunt instruments. For most players they are the only public window into a game’s real population, and the SteamDB numbers Box This Lap pulled for RENNSPORT show that window is nearly empty. The all-time peak of 306 tells its own story: this was never a Steam heavyweight, even during its most talked-about closed beta stretches. German developer Competition Company built the title around a series of gated access phases it called Proving Grounds before opening things up more broadly, and even at peak hype the storefront numbers stayed modest.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Concurrent players (SteamDB) | 20 |
| 24-hour peak | 25 |
| All-time Steam peak | 306 |
| R1 2026 prize pool | €10,000 (12 teams) |
| ESL R1 2023 prize pool | €500,000 |
| Esports World Cup 2025 prize pool | $500,000 |
RENNSPORT’s Prize Money History and What Changed for R1 2026
ESL FACEIT Group backed the game’s first major esports push in 2023 with a combined €500,000 across that season’s two competitions. Two years later, the sim landed a slot at the Esports World Cup in Riyadh with its own $500,000 purse, putting it inside the same event as franchises with vastly larger install bases. R1 2026, by contrast, is a much smaller operation: €10,000 total, spread across 12 competing teams, ending in an in-person final at SimRacing Expo.
Even so, the developer is now running a competitive circuit with real prize money and real competitive infrastructure on top of a Steam base that, according to Box This Lap, sits in the low tens at any given moment.
PC, PlayStation and Xbox Player Numbers
Part of the answer is that Steam was never going to capture most of this game’s audience. It runs on PC, PlayStation and Xbox with native crossplay, and Competition Company’s own survey data confirms how lopsided that split is: an official poll run in June, with 423 respondents, found 52.5% of single-platform players on PS5, against 24.3% on PC and 20.8% on Xbox. The 20-player SteamDB snapshot, in other words, measures only a minority slice of the community.
The studio has leaned into that console skew. On August 12, Competition Company launched a PS5-focused promotion cutting the Deluxe edition by 45%, the Standard edition by 20% and DLC by 15%. That discount structure is aimed squarely at growing the console side of the base, and it lines up with a business that looks increasingly console-first. The game’s esports roots still trace back to the PC simracing community — Competition Company was founded by former SimBin and RaceRoom developers, and the title runs on Unreal Engine.
Who Owns Competition Company GmbH
The funding question doesn’t stop at the platform mix. The corporate paperwork behind the studio was also part of what Box This Lap examined, and that’s where things get less clear. Competition Company GmbH is registered in Munich under Morris Hebecker, company number HRB 255467. Its sole shareholder is Competition Company Suisse AG — formerly registered as KF 15 Suisse AG — which increased its nominal share capital from CHF 172,210 to CHF 266,893 in January 2025. That capital increase landed in the same window in which the studio was absorbing a bigger structural shock: after publisher Nacon went into insolvency, Competition Company became a self-publisher across every platform the game ships on. Box This Lap doesn’t land on a definitive answer for who’s actually bankrolling the operation now, and neither the Swiss holding chain nor the developer itself has made public where the money for R1 2026, or the studio’s day-to-day development costs, is coming from.
How This Sits Next to iRacing, ACC and Le Mans Ultimate
The numbers also sit next to the established simracing field in Box This Lap’s report: iRacing runs on its own subscription platform outside Steam entirely, so its player base was never going to show up on SteamDB in the first place. Kunos Simulazioni’s Assetto Corsa Competizione and Le Mans Ultimate are both Steam titles with track records built over years of updates, licensed content and, in ACC’s case, an official GT World Challenge tie-in that predates RENNSPORT’s own esports push. Neither developer has published prize pools anywhere near the figures ESL and the Esports World Cup put up for this title in 2023 and 2025.
What the Funding Gap Means for Simracing
None of this changes what’s happening on track this week. The R1 2026 season is underway and the SimRacing Expo final is already on the calendar. The console promotion that wrapped in August suggests the studio is still actively trying to grow its player base. A title that’s self-publishing after a publisher’s insolvency and posting Steam concurrent counts in the tens, while running prize pools at a fraction of what it offered in 2023 and 2025, doesn’t carry the same financial cushion it had two years ago. Its own survey data puts PlayStation numbers well ahead of the PC side.
The prize money for R1 2026 is real, and it’s a tenth of what the game offered in 2023 and 2025. The ownership structure behind the studio, run through a Munich GmbH and a Swiss holding company that just raised its own capital, is something Competition Company hasn’t explained publicly. Box This Lap doesn’t claim to have settled that last part in its piece; it compares the Steam numbers against the prize money history and lays the corporate ownership structure alongside them, without naming a source for the funding.
