The Steam Summer Sale 2026 runs through July 9, and while the AAA open-world crowd and indie roguelite fans have already gotten their roundups, the racing and driving genre is sitting on some of the steepest cuts of the entire sale — a 90%-off official GT sim, a 90%-off arcade racer, and two Verified truck sims for under $5 each.
Prices below are in USD, pulled directly from the US Steam store as of July 2, 2026. Sale pricing is locked in for the full two-week event, so there's no need to rush before a timer runs out — but it's still worth double-checking the store page for the exact current price before buying.
Sim racing picks
| Game | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| $4.99 (was $19.99, 75% off) | The mod scene alone justifies the price — thousands of free tracks and cars. Officially Unsupported on Steam Deck, though the community reports it running well after manually switching to a Proton-GE build. | |
| $3.99 (was $39.99, 90% off) | The official GT World Challenge sim, and the deepest cut on this list. Steam Deck Playable out of the box. | |
| $34.99 (was $49.99, 30% off) | The current official World Rally Championship game, with the full 2026 roster of stages. | |
| $13.99 (was $19.99, 30% off) | Punishing, physics-first rally that's aged well; still one of the best surface-transition feel models around. | |
| $19.99 (was $39.99, 50% off) | Broad multi-class sim covering everything from Formula trucks to GT3, with a dedicated VR mode. | |
| $19.99 (was $24.99, 20% off) | Not really a "racing" game so much as a soft-body crash physics sandbox — still the smallest discount here, since it rarely goes deeper. |
Arcade and open-world racing
| Game | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| $29.99 (was $59.99, 50% off) | Steam Deck Playable (not Verified) — runs well with settings turned down, but budget roughly 110GB of storage. | |
| $6.99 (was $69.99, 90% off) | Miami-inspired open world with day/night police heat mechanics; one of the steepest cuts of the whole sale. | |
| $2.99 (was $29.99, 90% off) | Demolition-derby physics that still hold up; cheap enough to grab on impulse. |
Truck sim picks
| Game | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| $4.99 (was $19.99, 75% off) | Steam Deck Verified, with dedicated touchscreen menu support and full Convoy multiplayer. | |
| $4.99 (was $19.99, 75% off) | Same Verified status and Convoy support as its European counterpart, just with US highways instead. |
Worth noting: the CPU-heavy ones
Wheel-and-pedal sims like Assetto Corsa Competizione and Automobilista 2 lean much harder on CPU physics simulation than GPU rendering — the opposite bottleneck from most open-world games. If you're running any of these on a Steam Machine, that's worth keeping in mind: our benchmarks of the console's single-channel RAM configuration found the real frame-rate cost shows up specifically in CPU-heavy titles, which is exactly the profile these sims fit.
A note on Steam Deck and Steam Machine
Coverage here is mixed by design — this genre spans everything from touch-friendly Verified truck sims to sims that need manual Proton tinkering. Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator are the safest picks for handheld play, both Verified with proper touchscreen menus. Assetto Corsa Competizione is Playable out of the box. Forza Horizon 5 runs but isn't Verified, and the original Assetto Corsa is officially Unsupported despite community workarounds. If you're on a Steam Machine chasing higher resolutions in the GPU-bound picks like Forza Horizon 5, FSR 4 recently landed on Proton Experimental and already works on the console's RDNA 3 GPU, which is worth turning on before assuming a title needs lowered settings.
Sale pricing holds until July 9 — after that, don't expect discounts this deep on the sim racing side again until the next seasonal event.
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