Simbin explains the why and how of prohibiting Cross platform conversion.

After requesting to stop a modding/cross conversion project in progress by the German Modding Team, SimBin explains the why and how of their request. 

GMT has been cross converting the Nordschleife track to the ISI rF2 title. As with lots of modding projects, no harm was intended, but it is rather logical companies that payed and own the respective licenses, would suffer commercial loss. Simbin seemed to have dealt with this in a very professional and non aggressive way.  in a press release they explain their view on the matter.

SIMBIN Quote:

Cross Conversions – an open note to the sim racing community

July 30, 2013 at 3:58pm

As you may have read else where, we have requested certain mod teams to hold off and stop work on their projects. This is not something we decided in the spur of the moment, we have been doing this on occasion in the past.

We do feel the need to do this more actively since it has become clear that condoning cross game/platform conversions with a CD-Check has proven to be easily circumvented and therefor rendered useless as a solution. Another concerning trend is that more and more often on popular forums it is acceptable to release these cross platform conversions without checks. And on the other hand forums that respect the written and unwritten rules are having a difficult time maintaining the peace.

Everyday new people come into our corner of the gaming universe, where they can easily find sites with downloads (with or mostly without cd check) and start playing these “mods”, having no idea where that content comes from, which in our opinion is bad path to walk on…….This does not only affect us, but every development studio in our sim-racing corner.

Having discussed this with members of our dev team we decided to write an open “note” to the community and developers, explaining why we do what we do, in the hope we can get the ball rolling on running a clean community when it comes down to “illegal” mods.

As always your thoughts and comments are welcome!

Best regards,

Jay Ekkel

Licensing Manager – SimBin Studios

An open note from SimBin to the sim-racing modding community:

Hello Community members,

At SimBin we are always very enthusiastic when we see new mods arrive for our games or for other games. In the last few months we have seen some very talented people picking up on new game arrivals like rF2 & AC and are starting to produce some stellar looking content for their mods. And as many of you, we all drive a wide range of (sim) racing games and we are always on the look out for that one mod or that one track update for a game.

Modding is where quite a few of our developers have their roots and they still enjoy a side project every now and then! For us modding is improving existing content from an original game, or building something spectacular from the ground up.

But more and more often we start to see a new way of “modding”

Cross game/platform conversions

Original content from SimBin games like GTR, GTR2 and the RACE series is finding its way to games like rFactor, rFactor2 and maybe in the future to games like pCars and Assetto Corsa. We have had a long period where we condoned these mods when a DVD check was used, so people could be authenticated to owning the content. Sadly enough this method has been proven very easy to circumvent.

We therefore call out to you, the modding community to stop converting original game content from a SimBin game to any other platform. Or the other way around!! And let us all agree on a golden rule that original content from any game, stays within that game. If you feel like modding original content, keep it within the game it was build for or at minimum the same developer atmosphere.

We would like to try and make a stop to these conversions as they do not belong in any other game than their own.

We therefore ask you to look up at the many great talents in our community that create new cars and tracks from the ground up, these people put a great amount of time and effort into their work, that can only be praised. We believe that is where the skill is, that is where respect is earned. There are many talented people around that can create content for many years to come, and if you cant wait for that one bit of content you really want. Start your own project, its a great skill to have and who knows where it might bring you in the future!

We hope that this call to stop these conversions is picked up by the community leaders and owners, league owners and other developers to run a tight ship in their neighborhood.

• – No more cross game conversion, including conversion with a DVD check
• – Upgrading and modifying existing game files in the original game is allowed
• – Converting content from older SimBin games, to newer SimBin games is allowed, but only with the DVD check.
• – Converting content from a SimBin game to any other game not produced by SimBin is not allowed
• – Converting content from any game any other competitive game should not be allowed
• – Creating new content from the ground up will be praised

Lets maintain a clean community!

Your thoughts and ideas are welcome in the comments!

Best regards,

The SimBin Dev Team