Forza Motorsport - cinematic introductions from career mode as a social media content

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I was thinking what could help Forza Motorsport to be perceived as a game with a “soul”.

I have one fairly simple idea: have you thought about recording cinematics from the career mode and posting them on social media? :slight_smile:

Those cinematics usually are really great and I think they could help change the image of the game for the better, serving as some sort of “trailers” for new events in the career mode.

I bet many people don’t know that Forza Motorsport has such a feature (they could ignore it even if they played the game), and they would really appreciate it. Even Gran Turismo doesn’t have stuff like that in the career mode (I don’t count Extra Menus, they don’t have voice-over anyway) :slight_smile:

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Speaking as somebody that works in social media on other games (and has asked for similar videos in other games as social material):

  1. Cool/fun idea
  2. Vehicle manufacturer approval for social media videos is often separate to in-game approval, so every video would need to go for approval again. Probably the same for the voiceover artist.
  3. All videos would need to be converted from 16x9 format to 9x16 format, and probably reshot/framed by cinematics team (which would impact their ability to make future videos due to additional workload).

tldr: It’s a fun idea, but would require a lot of work per asset (and in total), and whether it happens or not would depend on effort vs reward and what the expected KPIs would be.

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Oh, I didn’t consider licensing (I thought it’s as straightforward as with screenshots) and social media video format. So my idea is not so simple after all…

Thanks for enlightening! :slight_smile:

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Licensing for screenshots often isn’t straightforward either, especially in games with big/varied car counts :sweat_smile:

Screens are often a necessity though, moreso than video.

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It’s getting more and more interesting… :sweat_smile:

I wonder how this works with community photos shared via #FMshare then (like in the X post here) :thinking:

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UGC is a bit different because it’s not created as “official marketing material” and may not always be subject to the same requirements.

That being said, so long as UGC shared by official channels respects the typical boundaries set out by car manufacturers (no rollovers, no heavy damage, no controversial imagery/liveries etc.).

I can’t speak for Forza because I’ve never worked there and don’t know their relationships with OEMs, but for the games I have worked on it’s generally been a case of “credit the authors, only use them on social and so long as you don’t make the cars look bad, you’re cool”. Some OEMs you still try and avoid even with this consideration though, as not everyone is okay with fan pics.

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It’s a great idea. Social media is free advertising :sweat_smile:. Might aswell take advantage of it.

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Forza Horizon team have been promoting the new Hide & Seek game mode with YouTube shorts recently, and they usually put something out for the new cars released every month. I guess they have a bigger budget for that sort of thing, considering their larger audience.

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Thanks for the insight, it’s very interesting stuff :slight_smile:

Now I can just hope it wouldn’t cause too much pain for T10 to post content like this on socials. Perhaps it’d be easier in Mustang Month since there are mostly cars from one manufacturer…