Time’s up for online races
The countdown has officially begun for NASCAR Heat players who still enjoy hopping into online races.
The NASCAR Heat series will cease all online services, including Heat 4 and Heat 5, starting August 1, 2025. This closes a long chapter for the franchise, whose last big release came in 2020.
The end was expected, but plenty of players still wished for online features to last through the next NASCAR game launch. That’s no longer the case.
The online closure is part of a much larger shift happening behind the scenes.
As the NASCAR license transfers from Motorsport Games to iRacing, older titles associated with Motorsport Games are being retired. In fact, NASCAR Heat 4, 5, and several related titles (including NASCAR Rivals and NASCAR 21: Ignition) were delisted from digital storefronts back in December 2024.
Although players who already own the games can still launch and play them, new purchases are no longer possible. Once August hits, they’ll lose access to any multiplayer content as well.
This covers features such as online matchmaking, leaderboards, and several multiplayer-only achievements, especially on Xbox.
In NASCAR Heat 5, there are at least four achievements connected to online gameplay, including one for securing 10 race victories.
These won’t be possible to earn after the shutdown, and since the servers have been unreliable for months, many players are already struggling to unlock them.
Physical copies of the game still exist, but they won’t bring back what’s about to be lost.
The frustrating part is that NASCAR’s next chapter with NASCAR 25 from iRacing hasn’t arrived yet.
The new game is expected to drop sometime in Fall 2025, but no official release date has been set.
That means there’s a potentially awkward few months where players will be stuck without any online NASCAR game to turn to unless they shift over to PC sims or other racers.
Some fans wish the servers had stayed up until NASCAR 25’s launch so the community would have something to rely on meanwhile.
To be fair, single-player content won’t be affected.
Career Mode, quick races, and even split-screen multiplayer will remain playable in both Heat 4 and 5. This situation isn’t as bad as other shutdowns in 2025, such as The Crew, which went fully offline and caused major backlash among gamers.
That backlash even led to the Stop Killing Games campaign, which now has over a million signatures protesting these sudden and permanent game removals. Compared to that, NASCAR Heat’s offline support staying intact is a small silver lining.
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