Racing games have always championed one thing: Burning rubber; and burning fuel. Shell wanted to inspire gamers and younger generations to master not just speed and power, but clean energy as well. And maybe even motivate them to become engineers themselves.

For decades, Shell has run its real-world Eco-marathon competition among aspiring scientists and engineers. Every year, about 10K students from all over the world are tasked with building innovative more fuel-efficient, clean energy vehicles then pitting their inventions against each other. The program has helped produce some of today’s leading automotive engineers.

Gaming would allow the program to expand its reach to inspire those who can’t make it to the actual live competition.

Introducing Shell Eco-marathon: Next-Gen, the first mobile racing game that makes understanding fuel efficiency and clean energy your keys to victory.

Inspired by decades worth of data and learnings drawn from actual racing performances of clean-energy prototype cars competing in the Eco-marathon, Shell developed a mobile racing game app designed to bring this experience to gamers and to Gen-Z youth.

Shell Eco-marathon: Next-Gen’s gameplay challenges you to master courses, take on quests to earn coins, race against other players online, and most importantly go to the garage to build your own fuel-efficient racer from scratch using prototype parts.

This includes designing vehicles with combustion, electric, fuel cell or hydrogen powered engines, thus learning a little more about the real-world implications of these choices.

Shell Eco-marathon turned what is essentially a university-level STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) Design challenge into an honest to goodness racing game.

There are 3.24 billion gamers across the world.

50% of Europeans play video games. Asia is the biggest gaming market, with 1.48 billion video game players. Shell believes that some of the future engineers may be among them.

The gameplay is developed as an honest to goodness mobile racing game including all the elements one looks for in a simulator. But with the challenge of fuel efficiency and using cleaner-energy baked in.

The game itself allows for multi-player competition and in-game social media component allowing for an exchange of ideas.

The physical Shell Eco-marathon competition attracts about 10,000 students a year. With the Next-Gen mobile game, Shell hopes to reach far more. Especially those who don’t have the opportunity/resources to join the live competition.

The games hope to inspire even more gamers to possibly become the next generation of brilliant engineers.

The game is still in its pre-worldwide phase but is already picking up in pilot markets with 13.2K DOWNLOADS just days into this phase, exceeding KPIs.

Average engagement is at 24 minutes daily per active user. The same length as the top 25% of ALL casual mobile games (per udonis.co 2023 Mobile Gaming Statistics)

It is the ONLY branded game to join entertainment racing giants in the top 50, even beating F1, CSR and Need for Speed in pilot markets. It was even among top mobile racing games in markets such as Singapore and India during this period.