EA has announced that DiRT Rally 2.0 Clubs will be shut down in July 2026, although other online features will still work as normal for the foreseeable future. The reason is that the game website which hosts Racenet Clubs, is being shut down on July 8th, which means accessing Clubs in-game will produce an error message.
DiRT Rally 2.0 originally launched for the PC, PS4 and Xbox One back in February 2019, developed by Codemasters before they were acquired by Electonic Arts in February 2021. It was followed up by Dirt 5 and most recently EA Sports WRC, which used the official licence for the series. Since then it’s been announced that Codemasters is no longer working on any future WRC titles.
From a business perspective, obviously it costs some amount of money and resource to support older titles. But it means that current players and communities will no longer be able to host events which allows a set number of people to take on a paricular rally or stage without having to try and look through overall leaderboards to see who won.
And that’s likely to be a fair number of gamers. While it’s only one platform, SteamDB puts Dirt Rally 2.0 at between 1,000 to 1600 players at any time during the past month, compared to 345 to 657 for EA Sports WRC, and 30 to 70 for DiRT 5. Part of the reason for the numbers is the availability of the older title over 6 years compared to 18 months for EA Sports WRC, but it’s also down to the community side, with Facebook groups etc for DiRT Rally 2.0 Clubs having thousands of members.
Back in 2023, DiRT Rally 2.0 celebrated 12 million players in four years.
It’s always a shame when features are dropped for games that are still reasonably popular, and given the rise of third-party racing services like Low Fuel Motorsport and SimGrid, it’d be good for developers in the future to allow functionality like this to be easily split out and run by someone else. Although it’s probably more likely that EA are simply trying to get anyone they can onto EA Sports WRC to recoup as much of their investment in that title and Codemasters as possible.
You can see every vehicle included in the game and DLC with our DiRT Rally 2.0 car list. Or buy DiRT Rally 2.0 digitally for the PC on Steam, the Xbox One on the Microsoft Store, or the PS4 on the PlayStation Store. Or you can buy a new or secondhand physical copy from Amazon or Ebay.
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