Are Real Cars Still Possible?

My thread begins with a question to the devs: Did you want to put real cars in the game, but didn't want to deal with licensing problems? Or did you not want to have real cars from the start? If you answered the latter, ignore the rest of my post, and feel free to delete this thread.

For many people, having real cars in a driving game is a major selling point. (This includes me, but I made an exception for BeamNG) However, for BeamNG.drive, it would be almost impossible to get licensing from companies who know that the game includes realistic crashing. They don't want their cars to appear unsafe. Also, the licensing fees would be a large financial burden on a startup company like BeamNG. (SMS got around this in pCARS by only licensing smaller brands, but they are still much larger than Beamng)

There is still one more choice. When a brand goes out of business, no licensing fees are required to include their cars in a game. This would leave a reasonable amount of brands whose cars can be used. All of the car brands dropped by GM, such as Pontiac, SAAB, and Hummer have some good cars. Other brands include: Austin, Triumph, Lotec, DeLorean, Fisker, Plymouth, Marussia, Vector, Mercury, Saturn, Aptera, and Eagle. So there's no shortage of choices. I gained this info from someone I know who works in the Auto Industry, so its pretty accurate.

What do you think? I would value the opinions of the community, as well as the devs. (And again, if you don't want real cars at all, just lock this topic and send it into oblivion)

 

GTA 5, no real cars, sells pretty good.

It's down to license costs really. And for real cars you still have the modders or yourself.

 

I don't mind driving analogues of real vehicles. This way more than one vehicle can represent a bunch of vehicles. Let's face it; BeamNG will never have the car selection like Forza has, but it does have the representation. We've got "the pickup", "the police car", "the compact car", "the rally car", "the Ferrari", etc. I really don't see the big selling point of having real cars, and it just brings a bunch of legal issues to the table.

For that matter, I seem to recall Gabe saying that licensing isn't the entire issue: depicting real vehicles in a virtual environment means that, say, Chevy won't be too happy if one of their vehicles is depicted as inferior to others. Also how do you think manufactures would take to the idea of having their cars in game, fully ready to be intentionally crashed?

So my verdict is no, we won't get licensed vehicles. And personally I'm totally fine with this.

 

I'm only suggesting brands that have gone out of business, so there won't be any legal trouble. As far as I know, GM, for example, doesn't have any legal rights to Pontiac anymore, as it is nonexistant.

 

Interesting idea. But i imagine the developers wouldn't want to combine both real and fictional cars. It could also be that the vehicle team prefers making their own cars.

I have wondered for a while what LA Noire did, the cars in that game are Fords, Nash's, Buick's and Lincolns and so on but i dont think that they got any of them licensed since they are all very old models with old logos. Also the sketches and news articles on the radio are all real radio shows taken from the period

 

Hmm. I think that once cars reach a certain age, automakers have no legal rights to them either. That's probably why they could have cars from the 40's and 50's.

Actually, I thought it would be rather interesting to combine real cars with fictional cars. That would make this the first game to do that. I'm still curious to see whether the devs are hostile to the idea. After all, it is their game.

 

I actually like the generic vehicles in a setting like this or in other games like GTA. This gives the devs the ability to poke fun at typical car stereotypes, like how the "Soliad Wendover" is a ugly cheese wedge that wants to be faster and cooler than it is. I think this adds a nice level of humor and personality to the game.

 

Exactly, hell by this point a load of cars in the GTA games even have a lore and story behind them. Its really quite cool.

 

You do have a great point there. Does this mean that any real cars are out of the question? Or has that not been decided yet? I wouldn't mind if that was the case, just curious. (I love Gabe's cars)

Thanks for replying!

(I know this is off topic, but great work on the tire physics in BeamNG!)

 

The devs want to make their own cars that are generalized from real cars. Take the Covet for example, it's a late 80s hatchback, very similar to one you'd find in real life like an old Civic. If you want an IRL car in game, there's plenty of them created by the community. I should mention that modding an IRL car is not illegal because the modders are not profiting off it like the devs would if they made IRL cars.

 

I really don't get this part. pCARS has Audi, Ford, Lotus, BMW, Mercedes, Bentley, and plenty of others. They really didn't only licence small brands at all.

 

I stand corrected.

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As I have already mentioned, I'm pretty sure that real-life cars would be perfectly legal if the devs only made cars from brands that no longer existed. My problem with mods is that there are so few good mods based off real-life cars.

I just thought that it may be interesting to have some real cars driving alongside Gabster's cars. If this isn't possible, I would still be satisfied with Gavril, Hiroshi, & the rest.

 

I feel similar as well. I never really minded that the vehicles weren't real when I first played drive.

Now these vehicles have become sentimental to me for some reason, and I'd much rather have them than real vehicles as the official dev-made cars. I guess it also makes waiting for a new car to be released more exciting, as it's not real, so you want to know more about what they look like, and compare them, etc.


I think there is no reason to have official real vehicles in this game, it'd be too expensive, and from what I know, the companies would not even sell a liscense due to showing potential "poor safety", etc.

Even if the company no longer needed to sell a liscense to have them in a game, I still wouldn't really want them. I'm sure many people would though.

 

My responses are in bold. I don't feel too strongly on either side. My only point is that I think it is possible to legally have official real cars without licensing fees.

 

i'm not so sure...
these defunct marques are no longer active, but the trademarks are still owned by someone, and they would actively try to block, or at least profit from, use of their intellectual property.
if i started trying to sell stuff with the SAAB badge on, GM would be onto their legal team like fleas onto a passing dog.

 

What about DeSoto, Doble, or Duesenberg? Something really old and defunct like them that have been out for decades. That might be doable perhaps? However, I would agree that I would prefer to have the game have its iconic cars that Gabe has created. It wouldn't really be the same without them.

 

Yeah. I love Gabe's cars too, and I'm not suggesting in the least that they should be replaced. You are right, really old cars from companies that folded about 60/70 years ago would be awesome. Now that I've done more research, I'm not so sure about what rights GM, for example, would have if BeamNG had Pontiac cars. However, I am pretty sure that if the whole company went out of business, (instead of GM just shutting down some brands), they have no legal ownership of the brand anymore. This would narrow down the list of available car brands, but there are some very good old brands, like atv_123 mentioned, as well as a few modern brands like Carbon Motors, Marussia, Coda (ugh), and Aptera.

 

Honestly, to me it's either all real cars or all fake cars. Mixing them has been a pet peeve of mine since RoR, as it's really confusing to see a real production vehicle next to a made up fictitious analogue of another real car. Could you imagine a Nissan 240sx next to an ibishu 200bx? Artistic conflict, I think that's what the know-it-alls call it.

the point is, you're a little late to be asking for real cars. I actually like the made up brands in BeamNG, and I imagine the vehicle artists have a lot more freedoms with them. Real car mean exact specifications to research, enthusiasts to please, and references needed constantly.

about the dead brand idea: names of a company that is out of business are still held by copyright holders, it's the reason the second a business goes under another one of the same name can't just spring up. There's also different laws in different countries, so I'd rather the devs spend time on multiplayer, more vehicles and career mode than tracking down copyrights and getting in legal disputes.

It's more trouble than it's worth.

 

These are all good points. This was only a theory in the beginning, and I wasn't too attached to the idea anyway...