The trailer for Star Wars: Galactic Racer shocked the gaming community. The game was announced during The Game Awards 2025, and apart from the trailer, not much is known.
But that’s the worrying part, because most fans thought of it as a new pod racing game succeeding the likes of Episode 1: Racer and Star Wars: Racer’s Revenge. But if you look at the trailer, pod racing is completely missing.
No twin-engine anti-gravity sleds. No breakneck canyon runs. No obvious nods to Episode I: Racer or Racer Revenge, which many fans immediately assumed this project was building toward.
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That absence has sparked a debate that’s only grown louder since the reveal. Is Galactic Racer skipping pod racing? Or is Lucasfilm Games and its development partner simply holding cards close to the chest? Either way, the decision matters more than any single feature list, because pod racing isn’t just another mode. For a huge part of the fanbase, it’s the entire reason this game is getting this much attention.
Why Pod Racing Matters More Than Any Other Racing Style
Pod racing occupies a weirdly powerful place in Star Wars gaming history. Episode I: Racer wasn’t just a spin-off game; it was a high-speed, skill-based racer with deep vehicle upgrades, dangerous tracks, and a sense of raw speed that felt unlike anything else at the time. Racer Revenge refined that formula even further.
Because of that legacy, fans immediately think of pod racing whenever racing in Star Wars is mentioned. When fans hear “Star Wars racer”, they don’t think about racing on flat tracks; they immediately think of engines roaring at 900 km/h while weaving through canyons.
That’s why the trailer’s lack of pod racing raised alarms. The concern isn’t nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. It’s the fear that Galactic Racer is positioning itself as a broadly accessible sci-fi racer, rather than embracing the one concept that historically made Star Wars racing distinct.
Why Developers Might Avoid Pod Racing — On Purpose
From a development standpoint, here are some of the possible reasons why they would skip out on Pod Racing.
Firstly, Pod Racing is technically demanding. You are not just building cars; you are simulating two separate engines, physics-defying movement, and tracks that rely heavily on verticality and environment. And, to that, at the level Galactic Racer is aiming to be sounds extremely difficult.
Then, there is the mass appeal factor. Pod Racing, despite being quite popular, is still quite a niche genre in the gaming world. When you are making a game as big as this and pouring in millions of dollars, you want to cater to a mass audience, and not everyone enjoys pod racing. A more conventional sci-fi racer set in the Star Wars world sounds a bit more promising and easy to market.
Then there’s canon. Lucasfilm has historically been cautious about leaning too hard into prequel-specific concepts unless they serve a broader narrative goal. Framing Galactic Racer as a “racing celebration of the galaxy” rather than a pod-racing revival gives the team flexibility to include speeders, starfighters, and original vehicles without being boxed into one era.
Why Skipping Pod Racing Is A Dangerous Bet
The biggest danger isn’t that Galactic Racer would be bad without pod racing. It’s it would lose its purpose.
The racing genre is already crowded, and sci-fi racers live or die by what makes them different. If Galactic Racer ends up playing like a solid but familiar futuristic racer with a Star Wars coat of paint, it will inevitably be compared with existing sci-fi racers.
Pod racing, despite all its complexity, is a unique feature that no other modern racer offers. It’s chaotic. It’s high-risk. It’s uniquely Star Wars. Removing it doesn’t just remove a mode; it removes the franchise’s identity in the racing space.
There’s also a trust issue. Fans are expecting it to be a pod racer or at least have pod racing. Sebulba makes a cameo in the trailer, who is, for those unfamiliar, a character tied heavily to pod racing. When expectations form organically like that, failing to meet them doesn’t feel like creative divergence; it feels like a bait-and-switch
A Smarter Compromise
Building the entire game around Pod Racing is a risky choice, given the technical complexity and marketing difficulty. But skipping it entirely is doing an injustice to the fans and losing the identity of the game.
The cleanest solution would be to make it a feature within the game. Whether it be a separate mode or have pods that you can unlock through progression. It would still be a sci-fi racer set in the Star Wars universe, but it would also have the option to pod race for those who want to.
That approach lowers risk while honoring history, and it reassures fans that the franchise hasn’t forgotten what made it special.
Because if Star Wars: Galactic Racer has no pod racing, then what’s the point of having a Star Wars racer? In order for the game to succeed, it needs to have pod racing.
