Creating cars for games
Hey
i have a very specific question.
How much must i change the shape of cars - besides remove of the brands stuff - that i dont get problems through licence stuff. For example i have a BMW M3, is there already okay when i "just" make a big grille? Or must I change the headlights too, which are very specific for this car.
Greetings
Steven3D
i have a very specific question.
How much must i change the shape of cars - besides remove of the brands stuff - that i dont get problems through licence stuff. For example i have a BMW M3, is there already okay when i "just" make a big grille? Or must I change the headlights too, which are very specific for this car.
Greetings
Steven3D
Replies
In a production environment. You'll either have a legal department getting the okay to use the real car, or you'll have to concept your own cars that are unique enough not to elicit the ire of the car manufacturer's lawyers.
I'm not talking about Indie Games either, I'm talking about big games with a 60$ price tag, using the likes of cars from big companies, simply not using the names.
Same with guns.
Sooo...I too am confused as to how this is possible.
Why would you allow people to use the likes of your car for free, when you can have EA or any other big company come in and pay your a premium to use the likes of your car in their AAA game?
Not to mention, you can't really call it ad per say, since I, and all the people I met who have played driving games, didn't exactly go out buying cars the in the next few days. If anything more people bought cars thanks to movies like TF then games like NFS.
It's very much also due to companies being very careful on how their car is represented in a game a game in terms of how you use it, how it is damaged or what you will eventually run over, they can be very touchy about that
Depends if the manufacturer's legal department is having a quiet day. 99% of them are at risk of being wiped by manufacturers if they wanted. The tiny percent of them that actually get actual authorization are usually pretty good though, but prices are all over the place.
Interestingly, free stuff isn't completely off the radar, Porsche killed off a free rFactor mod recently ( http://www.virtualr.net/endurance-porsche-cup-series-released-called-off ).
Student stuff is generally fine, for the most part they'll be happy for you to use their products, but may require extra consideration if it's for explicit public viewing.
For commercial applications, contact their sales/information and legal department, pitching to the former with the goal of helping with the latter.
To be completely fair that also comes down to the individual company. Audi is generally pretty cool for instance. Porsche and BMW can be a bit prickly in the name of representation, which is weird considering neither seem to have put any resources into styling since the mid '90s.
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I remember being told thatif you don't defend your trademark and just let others use it freely you are at risk of losing the ownership of the trademark.
Not sure how true this is, but legal stuff is stupid so this could be how it works
Errr.. lets not turn this conversation into that
Porsche and Ferrari tend to be the difficult ones (Ferrari had all their cars removed from Turbosquid marketplace, i had it happen personally).
Both Ferrari and Porsche do/did exclusivity contracts for games so they have to defend their property, as vprime says.