Forza Motorsport 6 – licence to be killed

A reader discusses the downside to having real cars and licensed music in video games: at some point those licences runs out.

Dakkar wrote several weeks ago about the demise of Driveclub and how the game is being removed from the PS Store at the end of August. Sony are also ending all online features on 31st March 2020 as well.

The licencing issue really does seem to pose a problem for games and it will certainly continue to, when they are no longer perceived as economically viable. Licensing car manufacturers seems to be a big hurdle and this is why we see one of the Forza games given away every summer, it seems, as the licences for the game expire later that year. Forza Motorsport 6 is free with Games with Gold in the second half of August; watch it disappear from digital sale before the end of the year.

(This Reader’s Feature was submitted before it was announced that Forza Motorsport 6 would be delisted on 15 September, so that prediction was right on the money – GC)

Digging a little deeper into this, I had a look on GameRankings.com for the top 50 games of the Xbox 360 generation to see which were made backwards compatible and the reasons for those which were not. Of these 50, 36 of them (72%) are backwards compatible and there were valid enough reasons for the other 14 not being backwards compatible:

Five were remastered, remade, or released cross-platform (Batman: Arkham Asylum, Batman: Arkham City, GTA V, Skyrim, Mark Of The Ninja)

Five are music games – also likely to have licence issues with the record labels, songs, artists, etc. (four Rock Band releases and Guitar Hero)

Three are racing games with the aforementioned car licence issue (Forza Motorsport 2, 3, and 4)

One is a yearly sport sim (FIFA 12)

Firstly, Microsoft can be credited for a sterling job with regards to backwards compatibility and getting their best titles on their next generation console and beyond. Secondly, it can be gleaned from these omissions from backwards compatibility that a digital future will be worrying with music and driving games, or just anything that requires licences in general.

Lego games have previously been delisted from sale; anything linked to another media property will likely go the same way. Maybe Marvel’s Spider-Man will go the same way in the future.

Back to the racing games though and here are three great racing titles that are both backwards compatible and available to buy digitally: Burnout Revenge, Daytona USA and Split/Second: Velocity. The reason they are still available, you ask? None of these titles feature real world cars.

Titles that are not available include all of the Need for Speed entries from the past generation (although current gen games are still available via EA Access), Driver: San Francisco, GRID, and Blur. The latter was somewhat of a retail failure, due to poor release scheduling, but all of these titles feature licensed cars.

People often ask why there are no good superhero games and this might be part of the problem. The licences are expensive to purchase and if they are successful, then you will need to continuously renew said licence to be able to keep it on sale. Perhaps this is why we have had three inFamous games from Sony over the last decade or so but zero Superman games. (That doesn’t quite work with DC characters as publisher Warner Bros. also owns DC Comics – GC)

Driveclub was never available physically at retail, but if you want to own a game indefinitely and be able to play it on systems going forwards, then it might be wise to make sure you buy the physical version of a game you love while you still can.

By reader NatorDom

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The reader’s feature does not necessary represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.

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