Does anyone know the story or stories behind the loss of so many cars in the transition to FH5? I remember hearing a little mumbling about Stellantis (sp?) way back when, but I missed whatever was being said about it. Was it licensing fees? Or some other game got exclusives we missed? Or what - anyone know?
No one knows for certain, so we can only theorize.
My personal theory as to why so many cars were cut between games was the pandemic. To eloborate further, the pandemic likely prevented Turn 10, Playground Games, and their contractors from scanning as many new car models as they would have liked to.
As a result, they only had enough new cars to include a small amount of them in the base game (so they could claim that there would be new cars even if there was only around 20 of them) and to fill out the Car Pass with completely new cars (to avoid repeating the “why are we paying for cars that were already in past games” controversy for the trillionth time).
Because of this, Playground was faced with the challenge of needing to fill out the Festival Playlist, but they didn’t have enough new content to do so, so they figured the best way to remedy this was to take cars out of the base game and readd as them as “returing content” until they could fully replenish their stock of actually new cars.
As for the missing Stellantis brands, I just think someone in the licensing office on the developer’s end really screwed up badly. How? I don’t know, but at least one missing Stellantis brand has appeared in every racing game with licensed cars released post-Horizon 5 (Heck, Gran Turismo 7 has them all), and I personally was able to debunk the Stellantis restructing theory. The short version of that story is Stellantis is merely restructing their European dealership network and it is not even set to happen until June of this year, over a year and a half after Horizon 5 launched without the brands in question.
Again, this is all just theorizing, but this is the only explanation I can come up with any sound logic that doesn’t demonize Turn 10, Playground, and Microsoft. I mean, if what I suggested is not the reason why cars were cut, then the only other conclusion I can reach is that all three parties are either incompetent, sleazy, or a combination of the two.
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There’s really no one answer to this but the Pandemic had a large doing, and a lot of it comes down to what cars are available on the market today; clearly we’re making a very obvious and boring shift on our car market. I think developers wanted to maybe take a step back and analyze which if any of the new, and boring cars to include, and not namely this platform either.
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This is a great answer. It’s really interesting that the restructuring theory holds no weight.
Another question I have is how much licensing can change in less than a year.
The Alfa 155 was introduced to FH4 in late 2020, with Series 30. Then, come late 2021 and the Alfa 155 (along with Fiat and Lancia) is missing. How does this happen?
And the Lancia Stratos was shown in the Car Sounds Showcase a few months before the game came out. They had the license, and then a few months later, gone?
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We may never know why so many cars were cut. I sort of agree with Runoff, but the hard facts are there:
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It’s extremely anti-player and offensive.
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It just makes the cars exclusionary and hard to find. They have no interest in putting them in the Autoshow at a later date or even bother to put them as seasonal rewards.
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Licensing may have been lopsided and as such we got a kneecapped list. Up until now we didn’t have nearly as many new Audis.
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Prior to the managerial shake up, they - the Let’s Go streamers - bragged about returning FH4 cars as new content. That is absolutely disrespectful, considering they were free (and some of 'em were paid) in FH4.
Also, as I (and Stang616) have said again and again, every car is individually licensed. People think just because the brand is licensed automatically means they can license any car that’s in their portfolio. Wrong.
Yes, we know they developed the game during the pandemic, which I can at least admit why we couldn’t get nearly as many new cars. But cutting out a chunk of FH4 cars is lazy.
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What’s really odd is that, if any of my theories have a hold in reality, is that Playground had a perfect solution to a lack of new cars already available to them. Just add cars from Motorsport 4 through 7.
In Horizon 4, they proved they weren’t shy about polishing older game models (for better and for worse in some cases), and even in Horizon 5, they’ve added a handful of road cars that were only ever available in Motorsport in the past.
I mean, yes, it wouldn’t exactly be new content, but at least it would be new to Horizon content and means we could see the return of cars that have been absent from the franchise from anywhere from 5 to 10 years. A far better solution than their current “cut from Horizon 4, paste later in Horizon 5” solution.
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It isn’t a new practice that began in FH5 though.
Sorry I can’t say anything more, seems it’s now forbidden to elaborate on here as well.
[Staff Edit - this is the moment to stop. You’ve made your point before, it’s off-topic for this thread. - TTMM]
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TL;DR but the REAL answers will be locked behind NDAs.
If I win the lottery I’ll offer to stump up the lawyers fees for any T10/PG enployee willling to spill the beans.
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Thanks, folks - good and thoughtful responses - what I was hoping for, although I expected that all we can do is conjecture.
But man I sure miss my Maserati 300S and my Alfa 33 …
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I want my Delta S4 and Bowler EXR S. Also the 037. And the Stratos. And the aforementioned 300 S.
We lost so much okay?
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Going to miss the Lancia Group 5 race car as well if the whole Stellantis debacle carries over into the upcoming FM.
If it gets sorted in FH5’s lifetime every single possible car should either go straight into the autoshow or we should have 1 big mega series with many of the cars as rewards each week.
Such is my cynicism though I would fully expect them to drag them out for 2-3 whole series if they’re ever able to put them in.
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On the bright side of things, come January when there is a new President and amendments are made to (if not the whole t*rd is flushed) the IRA’s exaggerated and incredibly impractical carbon abridgement programs/expectations – there will be less federal incentives for car manufacturers to pump out boring and bland models. Going to make a bold prediction and say if the abatement vernacular is not amended or trashed, expect another auto industry bailout in less than five years.
Guesswork on my part, but I assume the Fiat Group licensing had not been finalized (despite the dev team working with the car models) before the company went into reorganization.
Fiat and the other brands literally did not even go into reorganization until this month of this year, and the reorganization is revolving around the European dealership networks, not the offices containing the licensing divsion. So, no. That’s probably not the case.
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So you think the actual creation of the Stellantis holding company, several years ago, involved no reorganization of brands it owns until last month?
That’s not what I was saying. Of course, there were changes within the company when it was created, but Stellantis completed its merger in early January of 2021, a full ten months before Horizon 5 launched, so divisions such as the licensing division were most certainly completed long before November of 2021.
No, what I’m saying is that this was another “Toyota and street racing” moment where somebody online read the wrong thing, blabbed about it on Reddit as if they were correct, and 95 percent of the fandom believed them.
In October of 2021, Stellantis announced it was restructing its European dealership network (you know, the franchise part of the company were Joe Smoe buys cars to fill his lot to gain his end of the profit). However, a bunch of illiterate people misread this as Stellantis restructing the entirety of its European portion of the company (the executives, the offices, the factories, you name it). And, as I mentioned before, the dealership network restructing didn’t begin until this month as all articles mentioning the restructioning state it was set to begin in June of 2023, even the ones dating as far back as October of 2021.
I doubt very much that you know enough about the process to be “certain” there was time for licensing agreements for all Stellantis brands to be completed before the merger began, or after it was completed, before launch.
No, I never heard anything about the dealership network. My speculation on licensing vs. the merger is based on the timing of the merger, the fact some Stellantis brands are in the game and some aren’t, and the fact that the practice of contract law is often a long drawn-out process.
But maybe you’re right and either Stellantis entirely refused to license the Fiat Group brands, or the devs whimsically decided not to include those brands. Thereby leaving out some of the best rally cars ever from a game with a rally expansion.
Well, at the end of the day, none of us are truly right until somone in the know actually comes out and says something. At the very least though, I just try to do research before formulating my theories instead of simplying shrugging and saying “timing”, because if it were timing, all of the missing brands should’ve returned well over a year ago.
What about advertising? I know that is unrelated but I did catch some commercials advertising the Tonale plug-in hybrid.
As for what’s still going on: Frankly we don’t know why the FCA Italia brands are still absent to this day. I miss driving the Stelvio in FH4 and all those other cars. Even a Stratos was on the pre-release material for FH5.
Shame. Licensing is really complex and it might be a reason why other brands take so long.
How many licensing deals with Stellantis, or any European manufacturers, have you been involved in?
I only ask because you’re so confident in your opinion of how long those negotiations should take.