Straight4 Studios Announces Publishing Deal With PLAION

PLAION X Straight4 Studios.jpg
In a recent press release, Straight4 Studios, the team behind the in-development GTR Revival has announced it is joining forces with video game publishing company, PLAION.

Image Credit: PLAION Press page

Led by Ian Bell of Project Cars fame, Straight4 Studios is in the middle of developing its first simracing title as a games studio. GTR Revival is set to be the game every simracer is looking for and, in a recent press release, we have learnt that major game's company PLAION will be responsible for its publishing.

Set to become in the words of Ian Bell himself "a hardcore racing sim," GTR Revival is no doubt a niche title in the gaming market. But it seems the major outfit understands and supports the path. In fact, Klemens Kundratitz the PLAION CEO said, "Straight4 Studios has a fantastic vision."

Hopefully then, the title will remain true to its original goals as the Straight4 team should be given free reign over the project.

Who is PLAION?​

PLAION, previously known as Koch Media is the parent company of many game and film publishing firms. Gaming fans may recognise one of its larger labels, Deep Silver. This is the team behind popular series like Saints Row and Dead Island. Whilst these games franchises hide in the shadows of larger AAA alternatives, one can't knock their creativity and uniqueness.

Saints Row published by PLAION.jpg


When it comes to the simracing and racing game scene, PLAION also acts as the parent company for Milestone. Fans especially of racing on two wheels will be familiar with this publishing brand as it is behind recent MotoGP games, and is currently promoting the next iteration, MotoGP 23. In fact, it is a bike-centric company, also publishing the yearly releases of the World Superbike, Supercross, MotoCross games as well as the Ride franchise.

Finally, Vertigo Games within the PLAION group has deep experience with Virtual Reality. Publishing so-called 'experiences' such as the National Geographic, Anne Frank and Meeting Rembrandt VR titles. It is also behind Space Flight Orbital Emergency and Coaster Combat, two more entertaining VR games.

All in all, it seems the PLAION group of publishing companies has many skills that could prove beneficial to Straight4 Studios. Now, it's up to the two organisations to work together and create the best product they can.

The good news emerging from this announcement is that we can finally be sure that GTR Revival is a serious project. Now that a major company and games giant is onboard, the odds are further in the favour of Straight4.

What do you make of Straight4 teaming up with PLAION?
About author
Angus Martin
Motorsport gets my blood pumping more than anything else. Be it physical or virtual, I'm down to bang doors.

Comments

there is nothing wrong with arcade game, with game pad, the main issue with Project cars 3 is it was announced as "200% better than project cars 2", just say it's arcade, and all is fine
 
The state of the final product(s) will proof if this deal is a good thing or not.
 
That 1% are the early adopters driving things forward. I'd rather be working towards amazing VR than looking at a monitor and pretending it's an experience. At least VR looks like I'm actually in that car.
I don't know. I tried VR last year and in my opinion it's not worth that much money. I don't see the appeal of buying a 2000€ GPU & 700€ headset just to play a handful of games with blurry graphics, screen door effect and chromatic aberration, if I can have a super crisp 120 FPS image on my 700€ 55" OLED TV with a 600€ GPU.
 
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I don't know. I tried VR last year and in my opinion it's not worth that much money. I don't see the appeal of buying a 2000€ GPU & 700€ headset just to play a handful of games with blurry graphics, screen door effect and chromatic aberration, if I can have a super crisp 120 FPS image on my 700€ 55" OLED TV with a 600€ GPU.
Last time I looked a 3070 (which is good enough for VR) costs about 500-600€ and a Meta Quest 2 (which is great price-performance wise) around 400€. Still a lot of money but not as expensive as you made it look. Sure you can always aim for the insane prices…

I for one would never give up VR for a flat screen when it comes to simracing.
 
It's good to see more and new racing titles. Should be interesting to see what is actually delivered. I do not buy into hype and based on my terrible experience with Automobilista 2 I will never, ever purchase a game in Beta again.
 
Last time I looked a 3070 (which is good enough for VR) costs about 500-600€ and a Meta Quest 2 (which is great price-performance wise) around 400€. Still a lot of money but not as expensive as you made it look. Sure you can always aim for the insane prices…

I for one would never give up VR for a flat screen when it comes to simracing.
Yeah, when I looked for a 3080 some time ago, it was sold for nearly 2000€. Looks like prices dropped a little bit but they're still insane for 2 years old hardware.
 
The way it always works is early adopters pay through the nose. Eventually vr will be everyday prices and look good.
 
I don't know. I tried VR last year and in my opinion it's not worth that much money. I don't see the appeal of buying a 2000€ GPU & 700€ headset just to play a handful of games with blurry graphics, screen door effect and chromatic aberration, if I can have a super crisp 120 FPS image on my 700€ 55" OLED TV with a 600€ GPU.
Not knowing your exact hardware for VR testing, in that case I think you used too less time for right optimization per sim.

My starting point as a total newcomer to VR a year ago, not knowing anything about this world (apart from googling reviews and hw accomodations on beforehand), was that I thought I would be extremely lucky getting just anything satisfying or even possible out of my by then +5yo RX 580 gfx.

So I started first weeks using quite some time on searching for best practice on the internet and fiddling with getting it right for maxing out VR performance together with my bedated gfx.
And the very entry level of Quest 2 + old RX 580 it turned out to be surprisingly good, performance wise! Even a laptop solution of Ryzen 5 4600h/GTX1650ti invested mid summer last year turned out to deliver satisfying result!

Just by tuning right settings, both within sims, VR headset and every link between (e.g. VD or right hardware for cabled attachment).

Then late summer '22 finally upgraded to RX 6800 XT with dedicated USB-c 3.2 port, but even wireless VD via WiFi6+ turned out to be phenomenal.

Then 5 month ago invested in 65" LG C2 4K OLED for living room use, but also simracing via 20m optical HDMI2.1 to my quite new gfx in my office room.

And though it has been phenominal, too, 65" 4K@120Hz simracing with every graphics settings maxed out, to me flat screen racing now feels so bad old days technology immersion wise compared to VR.

so I'm back to VR.

Maybe the starting point is different.

Some ppl just expect VR to be Plug&Play from the gun, and if not the case they dump it.

But to my experience this is a rather silly POV. Google, YT, etc. is there to help you optimizing your VR performance.

Not saying that I've said bye to flat screen for good, but only on rare occasions now even though the possibility now for 65" 4K@120Hz attached to my fantastic +25yo HiFi Rotel amplifiers and 4x 300w loud speakers in bi-wire, nothing of this flat screen racing comes even close to my sim immersion through VR. Just by a tad of scrutineering.

Apart from that, my rx 6800 xt uses way more power and way closer to 114°C TDP by running 4K flatscreen compared to satisfying VR settings with just 2/3rds of wattage use and no critical max temps, where in VR much high work load tasks like Blur and MSAA can be switched off without the immersion of loosing anything, and lowering in-game res, just to max out depth of surroundings/world map together with maxing out VR resolution, through e.g. in-VR SteamVR per game display settings and so on.

IMO I think you should give it a second chance.
 
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Watched a video by his colleague Austin, in where u are able to talk to the engineer and he recommends changes for you live, similar to the pc2 engineer but literally a live conversation. Was pretty amazing

Here ya go

 
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Watched a video by his colleague Austin, in where u are able to talk to the engineer and he recommends changes for your live, similar to the pc2 engineer but literally a live conversation. Was pretty amazing

Here ya go

Just a question:
"Am I supposed to see this video?"
:unsure::confused::D
 
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That 1% are the early adopters driving things forward. I'd rather be working towards amazing VR than looking at a monitor and pretending it's an experience. At least VR looks like I'm actually in that car.
That is positive thinking :thumbsup: however VR doesn't suit all of us, I'm one of those pancake lovers and having tried VR (albeit very briefly) and though it didn't make me feel unwell I simply prefer the old fashioned way but without the need to pretend, my mind is a wonderful tool and it's capable of inserting me into a game/sim even on pancake, so I hope us Shrove Tuesday lovers continue to be catered for.
 
That 1% are the early adopters driving things forward. I'd rather be working towards amazing VR than looking at a monitor and pretending it's an experience. At least VR looks like I'm actually in that car.
Fully agree. I didn't reply initially because the guy is just trolling with his one percent here of course. The last poll here on RD was that something around 30% of the sim racers are VR racers and this will of course only grow because UnixRoot also has a point here:
I don't know. I tried VR last year and in my opinion it's not worth that much money. I don't see the appeal of buying a 2000€ GPU & 700€ headset just to play a handful of games with blurry graphics, screen door effect and chromatic aberration, if I can have a super crisp 120 FPS image on my 700€ 55" OLED TV with a 600€ GPU.
Agree that it's expensive. It's indeed a thing for the future if you don't want to spend so much money, and to get the graphics sharp enough it requires a lot of software knowledge and tweaking, not only money. A LOT. I did it all, and even with the 4090 I kept tweaking it to get the graphics great/not blurry. But once you did that then there is surely no return. Now that I run the Reverb G2 at 3400x3400px per eye in almost all racing sims it's just an insane experience. And it only gets better from here because of the Crystal that's going to get released and other future headsets and future GPU's will also be there. In the end, once it's affordable, the tech improves on ALL fronts (software, comfort, resolution, fov, weight, easy to use, heat, lenses, panels etc.etc.) than every single sim racing sim will be developed with VR first in mind, but this will take a long while probably since the development is going slowly.
 
"Hopefully then, the title will remain true to its original goals as the Straight4 team should be given free reign over the project."

That would be so unfortunate. A publisher not heavily controlling a company led by people with a record of unfinished and unpolished games, although financially successful, would be the worst idea ever. We are speaking about people who just stopped paying for the real time weather feature for pcars2, game with a remaining autoclutch even if you disable it.

Wait wait wait, Milestone's publisher??? Speaking of unfinished and unpolished games, we have a specialist there! Well, this deal makes a lot of sense then... we can expect another fun racing game worth the buy on sale between 1 and 5 euros.
 
there is nothing wrong with arcade game, with game pad, the main issue with Project cars 3 is it was announced as "200% better than project cars 2", just say it's arcade, and all is fine
To be fair, on this one, it was Codemasters' BS communication.
 
The proof will be in the pudding, with the game designer telling us exactly what's been wrong with every racing Sim for the past 15+ years then he has the chance to show is how it's supposed to be done, be interesting to see when it arrives
Nothing against him but do we expect a movie critic being able to make a movie? For sure no. So I don't expect anything from his position, it seems more a communication thing. Yeah that is bad talking, I may be wrong, I even hope I'm wrong. But, again, if all movie critics were able to be steven spielberg, it would have been known for many years now.

The facts are that both the developpment team and the publisher haven't delivered a solid finished racing game product in the past. Why should they do it now? This is not how they work, they just release playable enough products to be sold and maximise the profits.

Edit : to be fair, Gravel is a really good and fun title with solid physics, but with controls bugs (typical from Milestone) with some H shifters ; unpolished product...

I understand, it is just business, why paying for further developments if the product is already highly profitable? Who cares about the consumers? They should have read the review, they should not expect future updates. They know how it works. They believed the hype? Again??? Wow shame on them.

Edit : it is not that they are not able ro deliver, I'm sure they are able, they just don't need to deliver more to be profitable. Sector3, Kunos, Reiza, S397, whatever we think about their games, are dedicated teams who do their best to polish them. It's a whole different strategy. More risky but these studios are followed by passionate simracers. Who cares about Slighy Mad Studios today? Different approaches, different results.
 
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What is the reason for your passion for sim racing?

  • Watching real motorsport

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  • Physics and mechanics

    Votes: 114 42.9%
  • Competition and adrenaline

    Votes: 122 45.9%
  • Practice for real racing

    Votes: 49 18.4%
  • Community and simracers

    Votes: 71 26.7%
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