With the upcoming release of the full JDM: Japanese Drift Master game on March 26th, 2026, it’s been announced that the JDM: Rise of the Scorpion Demo will close on February 3rd, 2025.
The free prologue was released in August 2024 as both an introduction to the characters and fictional setting of Guatama, and a way for developers Gaming Factory to get input and feedback ahead of the full game release. It was a different approach to many modern games, which tend to just arrive in Early Access and hopefully evolve from there, and one which allowed people to sample the mix of mange storyline and simcade racing for free.
A number of updates were made following the release of the demo, including new cars, online leaderboards and various fixes. And monthly competitions have been running for drift and grip champions, who get a special role on the official Discord server as a reward.
But given the game engine for JDM: Japanese Drift Master has been updated to Unreal Engine 5 with significant differences to the prologue, along with better performance and optimisation, along with changes to the game physics, steering wheel support and more, it’s felt that the demo doesn’t reflect the quality of the final product, so it’ll go away at the start of February.
There will be a bit of time to wait between JDM: Rise of the Scorpion closing on February 3rd, 2025, and the release of JDM: Japanese Drift Master on March 26th. But you still have a few days to at least sample the demo at the time of writing.
You can find JDM: Japanese Drift Master for the PC via Steam, the Epic Game Store, and GoG.com. Keep up with all the latest JDM: Japanese Drift Master news, updates, DLC and more, here.
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