Greetings everyone!

Our 2026 efforts are already well underway, but there are still some weeks to go until the first major AMS2 update of the year; to help fill the gap and give some foresight into the road ahead, we wanted to present some reflections on where we are with it, how it has shaped our plans for the year and preview some of the highlights to be expected for AMS2 in 2026.

As you read this, please keep in mind that plans are always subject to change; the goal here is to provide foresight into the direction we are looking to take the game on, and inform some of the content and features we are planning to add for it. While we wouldn´t be presenting these plans if not confident we could deliver on them, there can still be hurdles that delay or outright prevent some of these from becoming reality; no assurances thus are given for individual content items of features, nor will there be a schedule for their inclusion to the game beyond the vague references made along this preview. So please take this for what is worth; if you ever decide to buy AMS2 or more of its DLCs, do it solely for the value it offers on the day.

With this little disclaimer out of the way, let´s look ahead and glance into what we are pushing to bring for Automobilista 2 in 2026!

AMS2 is about to enter what will be its seventh year since its release in March 2020, having continued to grow in this time year-on-year and looking set to cross one million copies at some in 2026; these are not figures we expected to hit when we first started developing it - it may surprise even some of our fans and those who tend to read too much into concurrent player figures. Fact is that AMS2 has slowly but steadily been finding its niche, amassing a decently sized user base for a PC racing sim title, with the positive reviews suggesting the vast majority are happy with what they´ve got.

As is almost always the case, room for improvement still exists and it is what we are looking to explore; as is known from user feedback and backed up player usage stats, AMS2 currently appeals primarily to sim racers who don´t have as much time to dedicate to the hobby; those who might race competitively elsewhere and jump into AMS2 occasionally to unwind, as well as those who just don´t want the stress to do it competitively or as often.

As a product that´s not a bad place for AMS2 to be - it is indeed how it has continued to be relevant and made a niche for itself within an increasingly crowded market; as a middle aged guy with a family myself with sim racing as a hobby for 35 years who still digs the thrill of driving & racing virtual cars as realistically as possible, I also often struggle to find the time to do it outside development work and therefore prefer the little I get to be the most fun, with most choices for least hassle; no surprise then that AMS2´s design caters primarily to that demand. From a business perspective, as the entry fees are the same irrespective if users put in 100h into the game or 1000h, AMS2 doesn´t necessarily need to do more to keep doing the numbers for the remainder of its shelf life.

We aren´t ones to settle though - Reiza was founded out of the collective passion of a small group modders turned developers, chasing the thrill of developing the best sim we could possibly make; the business was built to be the means for that end, and 16 years on that is still how we operate. There is still great potential to be explored with AMS2 and plenty of value to be offered to our users, so we´ve elected not only to continue as we were but give it an even harder push in 2026, boosting the team with new developers in every front, gathering new licensing deals and renewing existing ones. With firmer commercial, licensing and development footings allowing for a better defined roadmap, the goal for 2026 is to build harder and faster on the foundations we spent the past few years diligently putting together, to retain what AMS2 already does well and expand on the areas it still needs to improve in order to bring more players in and keep the existing base even more engaged.

As has been the case in most years so far, game updates should continue to come thick and fast, roughly one or two months apart from each other; the big milestone update in 2026 should be V1.7.0 towards the end of Q2, packing many new cars and tracks along with what should be some of the more substantial developments of the year - for Single Player gameplay, the highlights should be further AI race craft improvements along with adding the option for saving & resuming races already in progress (albeit with some inherent limitations); on the Multiplayer Front, the option to sign up and join Scheduled Races from third party services such as LFM and JR (already integrated and available externally with the help of SimGrid in our new Automobilista portal) will also be integrated into the in-game Lobby.

Several Quality-of-Life developments will be introduced throughout the year, including new UI localization options & improved content filtering / sorting options allowing users more resources to manage the ever-increasing (and sometimes even overwhelming) number of cars and tracks in the game in a way that better suits their preferences.

The overhauled HUD (available as a heavily WIP beta option in the current release) is expected to be feature-complete as of the next public release.

Further simulation improvements include more intrinsic tire damage properties, better wind simulation, and some other dynamic weather & track improvements.

Logistical realism options such as limited tire sets, tow & repair delays after incidents or breakdowns and limited spare parts are features we have been working on and off already over the past two years and which we will be pushing to conclude in time for v1.7.0.

Immersion features such as animated trackside flag marshals, dynamic crowd reactions and support for animated driver interactions are on the agenda.

Throughout the year we will also be expanding support for more diverse sets of technical & sporting regulations, including different qualifying and race formats, virtual safety cars, parc-ferme rules, ballast rules, a wider range of pitstop restrictions, additional championship scoring options along with support for inter-series class split scoring / leaderboards (particularly relevant for series such as Ligier European Series, Porsche Cup, F-3 and Lancer Cup in which two or more classes of cars with different specifications are meant to share the grid).

We will also be pushing to boost user customization options & improved modding support, including support for modding individual car performance (both as a way to better model various seasons in modding packs as well as producing bespoke BoP options for MP leagues), creating & sharing custom presets as well as championship files; as for mod cars and tracks, while users should not expect AMS2 to ever become a full-blown modding platform (given not only some of the game engine restrictions but also its very own design), we are pushing to remove or at least lower some hurdles in order to make AMS2 more accessible for creators of quality scratch-built content.

Finally, the big greyed out elephant in the main screen – the Single Player Career Mode is both what ties everything in the game in within this preview together, and is what requires everything in place in order to deliver the experience wanted from it; that is why it has always been planned to be the last big development for AMS2. There is some dilemma to balance – implementing career mode halfway through the planned features would produce an immense amount of maintenance overhead and lead to career progress constantly getting broken over the course of game updates; at the same time, the more AMS2 keeps expanding and evolving, the longer career mode gets pushed out, and we are aware that many users are anxious for its arrival.

Ultimately, there is bigger pay-off in delayed gratification here - it shouldn´t be controversial to suggest that a career mode with the game we have today would certainly be far more engaging than at any point in the past, and from everything outlined here one could expect that will be true again one year from now; some things are just worth holding out for.

We will cover more of the career mode´s design and how its deployment should pan out once we are further along; you may expect its implementation to take place in stages, with initial still planned for the latter half of 2026.

Moving on to plans on the content front: AMS2 has been designed to be as thorough a motorsports simulator as we could possibly make it; how far that would go was “To Be Decided’ when we started and that remains the case today, the baseline idea which has persisted is to represent (to one degree or another) the most popular motorsports series from the modern era going back at least six decades into the mid-1960s, along with some of the most unique & exotic classes that albeit not as well known, can be just as instigating to drive or compelling to compete in and which expands the reach of the sim in exciting directions.

Regrettably, delivering such ambitious plan in full with the depth and completeness we all would love to see is technically and commercially inviable – it would take decades to produce, many extra zeros in our budget and the untangling of an impossibly complex web of third party IPs (many of which inaccessible or simply defunct); our rationale here has always been that even a partial strike ratio would already make for a very compelling sim, so that´s what we set out to deliver; as the years keep rolling and AMS2 keeps adding more dots to that timeline, a higher resolution snapshot of these six decades of motorsports history gradually keeps building up, and we find ourselves ever closer to something far more representative than we thought would be possible.

Let´s take a step back and make sure unrealistic expectations are not being fed here: out of the box, AMS2 will never quite assemble full 1960s Grand Prix, 1980s Group Cs, 2000s GT1s, 2020s IMSA seasons with complete grids along with a whole catalogue of regional series and everything that might, What can be done though – and what we have been steadily assembling for at least a decade already since AMS1 – is to build a parallel universe for these 60 years of motorsports history, matching the real one on many levels, resembling it in some and abbreviating it in others; this is the “AMS2Verse” you are already familiar with, mixing real and fictional classes, cars, tracks and drivers; this universe is bound to expand significantly this year, with many gaps being filled as it evolves toward a simulated motorsports ecosystem of unparalleled depth even relative to its current standard.

Be it with more historic formulas or touring cars, modern prototypes or classic GTs, extended karting & dirt racing support, we will be both expanding our current roster of classes as well as boosting the grid of existing classes with additional contenders; we will also be adding more circuits – both new, and historical variants of those we already have – focusing on those of bigger relevance for the series and classes we have in the game so that more of them get more thoroughly represented.

At the moment the content roadmap looks roughly like this: the first update should feature a formula pack filling various gaps in our 2000s/2010s formula roster; from there we take a step back to complement our very popular 2005 Endurance Pack from last year with the second part of our Historical Endurance Pack; we will then travel way back for part3 to bring late 1960s Can-Ams and early to late 1970s Le Mans prototypes and late 1970s Group 5s, along with several circuits from that era; from there it´s a jump up a couple of decades for some 1990s British Touring Cars, back to 2005 for German Touring Cars and it´s finally back to modern times in order to catch up with as much as we are able in what we might still be missing in various fronts.

Do keep in mind again please that this roadmap isn´t definitive - things may and often do get shuffled around. The order of the factors though should not alter the final 2026 AMS2 product.

The way the content is delivered should in turn follow a more well-defined strategy, similar to what we has already been done in recent years: car packs centered around a given era or series, often accompanied by one or more circuits befitting that era or series, wrapped with a game update that brings features, rules & other developments that are pertinent to that era / series.

Given the items in these packs will often continue to involve various IP licenses, the paid DLC route is how we can manage to keep them viable; we do however have plans for more free base game cars and tracks in the mix as well.

If you bought the game and are still engaged with it to make it this far, you already have; rest assured we have the means to keep pushing with our plans. If you haven´t got the game yet, doing that along with the DLCs that entice you should cover it – it is thanks to both old timers and their continued support along with influx of the relative newcomers that we still are able to keep up the pace and even shift up a gear at this point.

We are evaluating a couple of options to attend those who really want to take their involvement one step further as well as those urging for a “one and done” purchase option, including potentially re-opening the Paddock Club for new members – more on this soon.

That covers it for this preview! We hope this has made you excited for the year as we surely already are.

We look forward to catching up again for more details on the first update of the year at some point in March!