The reboot of Ubisoft’s popular Trackmania has finally made its way to consoles (Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PS4 and PS5) and cloud platforms (Amazon Luna), three years since it was first released on PC. While this version of Trackmania is being marketed as a free-to-play release on consoles, there’s a bit of a caveat: you can certainly download it for free, but you can’t play for free.
Gas tax
Trackmania (2020) brings players back to the Stadium environment, with the classic gameplay mechanics of building insane track designs and creating the challenge of setting new time records. The whole focus is on making your way up the leaderboards as you find the most time efficient racing line around each track. In addition, you can create challenging courses of your own.
There are also the added social mechanics that come with sharing track designs and paint schemes for your cars, as well as more competitive elements such as facing off in tournaments.
While Trackmania (2020) features improved elements from the hit Trackmania Nations (2006), the way you access the game’s content is a bit different.
Is Trackmania free to pay, or free to play?
As alluded to earlier, while this is a free-to-play release, that only truly applies to the PC version. With the game now making its way to consoles, while you’re free to download it to your system choice, you’ll first need to have an active Xbox Live or PlayStation Plus subscription in order to actually play it. There are truly free-to-play titles on these systems that bypass the network subscription, so it’s not a limitation of the consoles. Rather, Ubisoft and Nadeo opted to still put the game’s access behind a paywall.
To add further insult to injury, Trackmania (2020) is only free-to-play on the most basic level. It features its own subscription model that includes three tiers: Starter, Standard and Club.
Starter Access grants you the ability to play with “regular content”. You’ll need to get a Standard year pass to also gain access to the other features which encompass daily selection and club solos, live events, club rooms and the ability to create tracks and test online.
The top tier , Club Access, then grants all aforementioned features, along with the ability to join and play in public or private clubs, create your own club and activities and customise your car with skins.
It must be noted that the “year passes” aren’t like your typical Year Pass for other titles that allow you to access all of the content released for the year as a discounted bundle. In Trackmania’s case, its year pass is like an annual membership, meaning that it has to be renewed every year in order for you to keep accessing its paywalled features. Unfortunately, there’s no free trial option of these premium features, nor is there a monthly option either. Your only way to try out the game is via the Starter Access tier.
While this is not at all Ubisoft’s only live service title, its one of the few to use such a limited subscription model. This has been one of the game’s biggest criticisms, as past entries in the series were all stand-alone releases.
You can read more about Trackmania over on Ubisoft’s official website.
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