One of the biggest aspects of livery design is logos. Whether it’s a full race car stickered in them or a simple track build with one or two, they completely change the vibe of a car.
Unfortunately, the pre-set decals Forza offers aren’t just unsatisfactory, they’re basically unusable. From meaningless, niche selections (like the Xbox logo) to terrible logo design (The Porsche logo has a white box around it, like it’s a JPEG) they are far from ideal for being used in liveries.
Yes, there is a vinyl creator. No, I’m not spending six hours painstakingly replicating an aftermarket logo that’s going to take up 2% of the car. No, I’m not going to use other’s logos which look inaccurate, terrible, and also immediately lock the design from being shared.
So for the love of everything racing games, for Horizon 6 PLEASE have a wide, varied, and extensive roster of real world performance brand logos we can use on our car liveries. HKS, Eibach, TOYO, all of these performance brands already appear on pre-tuned cars in the game. Let us use them on our own cars.
They need to be well made and tweakable. They need to be black or white by default preferably with options to recolor them. They need to be properly shaped and formatted (many in 5 are squares or circles when they don’t need to be, the ideal logo for liveries needs to fit within a rectangle)
this is one of my biggest (yet simple) requests for the new game. PLEASE.
also, i’d like to have multiple logo options for the same brand, for example when using a Ferrari logo, you should have the option to place just the horse, just the text, or the actual badges that go on the cars
Hey there this is an awesome post and I completely understand your frustration. As a painter working in the livery booth creating vinyls can take hours and when you finally feel like you got it figured out you need to make another vinyl….. and the endless cycle repeats. That being said realistically this might not be as simple as you may expect.
Licensing of each manufacturer logo to be inserted; just because it appears in game as a functional body part/logo doesn’t mean that its fully licensed. I.e. imagine using the toyo tire branding in a ugc format slapping it on the car and then saying this other brand is better. Having that ease of access might hurt the company more than anything. So having it as just a branded part where it would be much harder to hurt their image would be easier. Licensing is an extremely complicated and lengthy process.
I know a few different companies and even my college as an example that you have to buy rights to use a specific logo legally. These logos cannot be tampered with in any regard. Even goes to the extent of saying they must have a specific size range (cant be to small or to large), must have a specific background (cant have anything that takes it away from the logo/harms the logos integrity), and under no circumstances are you allowed to alter the color of the logo. I know one person I have talked to about a decal mentioned that it has to be sourced to a approved source. Even if you comply with all of the legal documents regarding it; if all the sources are not approved it falls through.
I am not a developer nor do I have any experience with how licensing works in this game. I could only imagine how much of a nightmare it could be with experiences I have ran into with things over time. Main things that stood out to me that would more than likely be a issues is the background behind the image, possible alterations of brand name, sources of where the logos can be placed (getting approval from every manufacturer to allow that brand to officially be able to be placed onto a car), choosing of specific companies that doesnt interfere/compete with other companies to possibly hurt agreements/close doors for opportunities in the future, or even something as small as forced sizes/aspect ratios that Forza wouldn’t be able to comply with (we all know that forza can allow manufacturer logos to get so small/large you cant recognize it anymore). This isnt even to mention anytime a logo was to change how they would have to take time away from other tasks to focus on making sure the logos are not outdated.
Licensing is like a grandfather clock with a lot of cogs to make it function. Even the slightest slip up and those cogs will not work and the clock will stop functioning as well.
ferrari have wierd rules this is prob why microsoft choose to not do decals because its annoying having to go through all the cars and denying certain decals on certain cars . GT7 is a example of this you sit in a Ferrari and all the decals get removed except ferrari certified stamps , shell , ngk ect
also same for body kits . put body kit ferrari badge gets removed its just headaches
TLDR:It would be great to have more logos… I agree.
But I can imagine it’s more cost in time and money than it’s worth against other licensing priorities and the fact that we have a built in editor.
I’ve done software design and had to integrate branding.
I also worked for Shell Gas International for a hot minute.
Back then - The style guide for the Pectin Logo alone was about 150 pages.
It covered size, color, placement, and every other esoteric type
rule you can think of regarding how and where you could display it.
The entire Shell style guide was about 1500 pages.
Can you imagine that every single logo you see in this game has a style guide that’s 500+
pages or more then multiply that by everything you see in game that is legally someone else’s?
Which is about 95% of the assets in the game.. Up to and including the real world locations we inhabit. (have you read what the opening title sequence says about the licensing of ruins in FH5? Check it out… ever wonder why we can’t drive on a large majority of them?)
Most of this comes from case law: If you don’t protect your brand, if you allow it to be diluted - then you can lose control over it. Many companies, especially those in this specific genre and with deep pockets maintain very strict control over their branding for these reasons.
So many different things that come into play beyond paying for some licensing suffice to say.
Most of it directed by the businesses that MS/T10/PGG are doing business with to secure rights.
And a great real world example of all of this is Polyphony Digital, Sony, and their unbridled access to Japanese market stuff that most other studios don’t get.
All that said - it would be great to have more logos… I agree.
I don’t know what the implications of that is however - but I can imagine it’s more cost than it’s worth against other licensing when you consider we can technically make anything we want without repercussions, and that in itself is pretty cool even if the interface is one rung above MS paint.
It does feed into a very large part of the games core in the creation and sharing of these works and that whole rep system. (argue about that in some other thread). One of my top 3 downloaded logos is a Michelin Logo - pretty much the same as the one in the game, except for the Michelin Man. So people even then want it, will get it from me instead of the brand logo that is scanned in. Downloading my logo drives multiple engagement devices in this game - scanning in every logo known to man kills those engagement points - and there is solid proof that players prefer player made assets over the supplied assets anyway. (thus why spend time paying for them, and scanning them when that time and money can be spent else where).
I understand it’s a complicated process, but my big caveat is Gran Turismo 7. There’s literally hundreds of pre-made logos, and they’re even neatly divided into Fantasy (fictional brands) and Manufacturer (real brands)
Some logos have multiple variants even. The only example of licensing being an issue in this is that Ferrari cars have their own much smaller roster of decals. That’s it.
And I need the ability to put decals on the windows, change colours on windows trim, grill etc. and the possibility to paint front and rare rims separately.
310 Decals Real World Just Like: Alpine, Seibon Carbon, VIS Racing, Wings West, HKS, Big Country Labs, Bomex, Do Luck, Samsung, JVC, Kenwood, APR Peforamce, Moza, Fanatec, Logitech, GT Radial, Edelbrock and More
I would just be happy if I could change the color of the logos that were already there. When of that is only original colors, black or white (I understand brand can get picky about their colors).
