Licensing questions

[BanjoMaster]

Question for Aris/someone else at Kunos:

When you procure a license, do any of the manufacturers put conditions on any other licenses you can acquire? For example, you've got the Z4 GT3 licensed. Do BMW then ask you not to officially license and include any GT3 cars from other competitor manufacturers, like the SLS GT3 for instance? I'm just curious, as the trend recently in most sims seems to be that one car of each type is included, e.g. one GT3 car, one LMP, one historic formula car, and so on, so that races between equal machinery are pretty much one make series. Personally, one make championships are pretty much like kryptonite for someone who lives and breaths for multiclass sportscar & enduro stuff.

Many thanks,

 

[Aristotelis]

Nope nothing like this exists.
Still, to better answer your question, to make a championship you'd need to get license from every single manufacturer AND from the championship owners. Combine this that some manufacturers do not hand out single car licenses and other small letters here and there and you can see it's not the easiest thing to do.

 

[BanjoMaster]

Oh no, I fully expect that licensing a full championship is not possible, or even at all desireable or necessary when the game is fully moddable. Was just curious, and I also wouldn't be hugely unhappy if Kunos were to release a few more officially licensed GTE/GT3 cars in time AC looks to be quite unusual in that it will come with different competition cars of comparable pace, as the Z4 and the P4/5 are pretty much a match for each other.

Cheers very much for the response, though. Much obliged

 

[Leonardo Ratafiá]

so, there's little to no chance that a for formula abarth will not include skins for the real series..? or sth like that

 

[BanjoMaster]

Thought I'd resurrect this thread with another question: why are the same car and manufacturer licenses popping up in multiple games? Do these manufacturers have a different, more open thinking on marketing through licensing, are they cheaper than other manufacturers, or is just a case of developers chasing the licenses that customers are asking for? Note: I am definitely not complaining about the current crop of cars included and forecast for AC - as far as I'm concerned, AC lives in a vacuum. I have no interest in comparing the same cars in different sims, primarily because I'm not interested in any other sims!

 

[XN-Sigma]

I think it's more a matter of "not staying behind" in the licensing deals than anything else. Like, sim A got the mp4, sim B got it too, hey we need to get it too to stay even! And so on... But if you look closely to the AC's car line up, they are adding several road cars, which is something really rare on PC racing sims, pCARS is only just now getting a few road cars, and also AC will have Ferrari, this alone is even more rare than road cars. So I'd say Kunos is doing alright right now.

I'd guess AC 1.0 will have the "basic sim" line up, I mean, the typical cars you'd find on every sim, and then depending on user feedback they'd get more unique licenses for DLCs, at least that's what I think.

 

[Stereo]

Only so many cars customers want has gotta be a big part of it. I'm sure there exists a Dacia Sandero enthusiast club but for a broad audience, Ferraris and GT3 cars are just more exciting to race. Making the game open to modding lets the enthusiasts do what they want, and really if you want variety, a popular game with a large modding community is the fastest way to get it.

Kunos seems pretty well committed to getting a good variety, but each one takes time and they're a small team. The more copies they sell, the easier it gets for them to afford the licenses customers want, too.

 

[Justin McLeod]

so, there's little to no chance that a for formula abarth will not include skins for the real series..? or sth like that

I consider this a waste of time for developers in a game where the community can/will create full livery packages for every season since time began. We have many talented artists that will be glad to do this stuff, thankfully. It's also a chance for the less talented (like me) to contribute seeing as I can't mod anything more than this, as well as being quite satisfying to create something like this and then run it on your own car.

 

[Aristotelis]

so, there's little to no chance that a for formula abarth will not include skins for the real series..? or sth like that

We'd love, but can't do it because we don't have the license of the actual championship. As I said above, you need both the license of the car manufacturer as well as the championship license to be able to provide true to life liveries and such.

We hope the community will give us a hand on this, because personally, although not really a single seater fan, I think the car is unbelievably good for racing, really top stuff.
Even more importantly, we did the car with direct input from the instructors of the italian racing school for the formula abarth championship and they are amazed by how close the car is to the real thing and how it reacts to the slightest setup changes.

Back in topic. Here's how we try to choose the cars. First of all we must love them, so they must be cars that we dream about.

Then we need to check if we can get the license. It's not always easy or possible.

From those we can get, we try to pick the ones that we think people will also be interested to drive. As an example, I'm a vintage guy, but I do realise that most of the people want to drive modern cars so I must think about sales too. So we choose only some vintage cars that are particularly famous and then we try to pick modern cars.

Then we try to get at least two very similar cars from each "group" or "series", so we can put them against each other and create some competition.

Finally we get some single series cars or simply some that are just too good to not have even though there is no competition.

That's pretty much how we choose our cars... there are compromises but there are always hand picked.

 

[Hampus Andersson]

You seem to have done the best job of all time when it comes to choosing cars

Maybe in the future we can get Championship DLC´s like DTM or similar

 

[Justin McLeod]

As an example, I'm a vintage guy, but I do realise that most of the people want to drive modern cars so I must think about sales too. So we choose only some vintage cars that are particularly famous and then we try to pick modern cars.

Speaking of Vintage, what are the chances of the Vintage GT and Replica GT making a return to AC since these are fictional cars with no license?

Also in keeping with the topic, does (or did) releasing such cars which are so similar to a certain Coupe encroach on picking up on a license for that car? They say "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery", but do people like the Shelby team see it that way? I hear the man himself (RIP) had liked the fact his cars have been put into digital form in the past.