Is the Thrustmaster TH8A Still Worth It in 2025? (Review)
Is the Thrustmaster TH8A still a good buy in 2025? Here’s a quick look at how it compares to modern alternatives and why it struggles in today’s market.
Is the Thrustmaster TH8A still worth it in 2025? If you ask me, probably not. The TH8A is one of the most recognizable sim racing shifters ever made, but it was released way back in 2012 and has remained completely unchanged for over a decade. Even today, it still retails for around $200, which puts it in a very awkward position in the modern sim hardware market.
To be clear, the TH8A is not a bad product. For its time, it was genuinely impressive. It offers adjustable resistance, it is built out of metal, and its shifting feel is still pretty decent for a non-active, non-force-feedback shifter. It gives you a traditional gated manual driving experience and does so with enough consistency that many sim racers have been happy with it for years. From a longevity standpoint, it has proven to be tough as nails.
The problem is simply that the rest of the industry has moved on. In 2025, there are multiple shifters that offer the same or better feel, more configuration options, and more modern design choices at noticeably lower price points. Take the Turtle Beach VelocityOne Multi-Shift, for example. It gives you a configurable H pattern and sequential mode along with strong tactile feedback, and it is priced significantly lower than the TH8A. Then you have the Moza HGP, which brings better build refinement, smoother engagement, and a design that feels far more up to date while still undercutting the TH8A in price. Even Thrustmaster themselves have made the TH8A harder to justify by releasing the TH8S, an $80 shifter that offers similar performance for less than half the cost.
Lowest Current Prices:
That puts the TH8A in a strange spot. You are paying a premium for a product that simply has not evolved. There is no modern tech, no quality-of-life improvements, no sensor upgrades, and no real reason for someone entering the sim racing world in 2025 to pick this unit over the newer alternatives. The only people I can genuinely recommend the TH8A to are existing owners who already have it and want to keep using it, or someone who finds it heavily discounted on the used market.
As a full-price purchase in 2025, it makes very little sense. The newer offerings give you more flexibility, more features, and better value… and they do so while pushing the TH8A further into relic territory. For a product that once defined the hobby, it’s honestly surprising that it has not been updated even once in twelve years.
So is the TH8A still worth it today? Not really. Unless you are nostalgic or committed to the Thrustmaster ecosystem, your money is better spent on the modern shifters that actually reflect where sim racing hardware is in 2025.
