Toyota comes clean on licensing (what we all knew)

Miscellaneous Xbox & Games Industry
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After Toyota UK replied to a question about NFS Heat missing Toyota with them not promoting “illegal street racing”, the tweet was deleted.

Proof: https://twitter.com/jacoja06/status/1163916357039206400

Now today, ToyotaUK makes a statement:

"We love that you want to see our cars in all your favourite racing games, and honestly, we want the same thing.
Most of us in the Toyota GB social media team fell in love with cars through games like TOCA, Daytona and Gran Turismo. One of us even has fond memories of Pole Position on the Atari!
Officially, Toyota Motor Corporation has no concrete plans to license its model range to any other games besides Gran Turismo Sport at the moment.
When you challenge us as to why Toyotas don’t appear in your favourite racing games, we don’t want to reply to you with a generic message, but we’re currently limited in what we can say and yesterday we got our response wrong.
We’ll be really excited to share our future plans with you as soon as we’re able to. In the meantime, whether it’s Gran Turismo Sport, Forza or Need for Speed, keep on racing."

Link: https://twitter.com/ToyotaUK/status/1164177384599429121

Exclusivity was bad with EA and Porsche and is equally as bad with GT and Toyota. Shame on Toyota.

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Something is telling me that this is no longer about specific games now. Seeing as how GT is a Playstation exclusive, I have a feeling that Sony also partially paid for the rights for Toyota to be only on their platform. This would also explain why Toyota can’t go onto forza right now, because Forza is a Xbox exclusive. Maybe if both consoles would learn to cooperate with each other, they could both have both games and everybody would get more money and cars to play in their favorite games. This is just a thought, but you honestly never know when it comes to console rivals.

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Sony doesn’t even allow cross play in many titles. So how do you expect them to work together with competitiors?

Japanese companies are way too overrated.

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Yeah, I know they don’t. I don’t foresee them doing it either. But it’s just a thought of how maybe if they all work together, everyone would he happier. :slight_smile: Tbh if Sony and Microsoft ever really did come to agreements with sharing exclusives, I think it would literally break the internet. Especially given how they both constantly try to outdo each other. They’re kind of like Vegeta and Goku from Dragon Ball, one will be bested by the other and the other tries to go out of it’s way to do the same. The cycle never really ends. But one can always hope I guess. :slight_smile: Hope that a little bit of this made sense.

Tldr:
Forza will most likely never get Toyota again.

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Kids too young to legally drive a car in real life have to explore them through videogames. Toyota chose to give free advertisements to all their competitors, on the track, on the road and off the road. They built more cars than many other brands, but for some unfathomable reason, they didn’t outsell those. Toyota is not some obscure luxury brand which sells only cars human beings can’t afford, or that would be bullied by Sony, its net worth is greater than Sony’s.

Unlike videogames, when I drive a car I’m entrusting my very life to its manufacturer, a manufacturer I would like to be staffed by people whose decisions aren’t as self-harmful, so it seems I’ll continue to never drive, let alone buy, a Toyota for the rest of my life, something I discovered I’m extremely proficient at.

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Toyota doesn't love us
*Tweet got deleted

Meanwhile, at the set of the new F&F movie…

Meanwhile, somewhere in the middle east…

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By the looks of it, if they deleted the tweet and went as far as releasing a statement on the matter, then my guess is whoever ran that twitter account is now looking for a new job.

Case in point, it’s not just street racing focused games that aren’t getting Toyota. What about Forza Motorsport? That doesn’t promote illegal street racing…

At the end of the day, it’s their choice and we can’t argue with that. But being one of the most popular car manufacturers out there you’d think they’d care a bit more about their followers and not play corporate favouritism. Oh well, I’ll just support brands that don’t kick their fans in the guts.

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Well… The only people who didn’t “know” were those who think PD (and especially Sony) are saints who do no wrong, lol.

The community’s mentality is so warped that pretty much all of the burden of NOT having Toyota in their games was laid on T10’s and EA’s shoulders and not Toyota themselves! Unfortunately, Sony know they have a better image than Microsoft and they play on people’s emotions to suit their interests.

That’s how they sold more consoles this gen, in fact: they helped boost the negative press against Microsoft’s already bad launch of the Xbox One, which, combined with the Xbox One’s lesser hardware, made the PS4 leap ahead and stay there until now. It was never about the “exclusives”.

As for me, I’m disappointed. It’s far from my favorite brand, in fact they haven’t made anything that interests me in a while (the Supra is a BMW and the 86 is largely a Subaru), with most of the fancier cars coming from Lexus or restricted to limited runs (Yaris GRMN for example). They also took an extremely anti-sporting stance in the WEC, effectively ruling their private competitors out of contention in league with the FIA, in order to give Alonso his coveted LM24 win (hence my current sig).

Speaking of the Yaris, it also sports the stupidest acronym in automobile history (what have Gazoo done to call themselves “Masters of the Nürburgring”? lol), but at least it’s a competitive car.

But I thought that, with Porsche finally ending their contract with EA and Ferrari’s licensing stance becoming more lenient, we were past that. Sadly, it’s not the case.

And it’s even more ludicrous when you realize Toyota is not Ferrari, nor Porsche. Toyota is not even BMW. Most of their current fame comes from Initial D and from FnF, and the Supra itself is only a good dragster because the 2JZ-GTE is such a heavy, sturdy block. Meanwhile, their venture in F1 was a complete failure despite the largest budget on the grid and they couldn’t win LM when they were not racing alone.

Still, it’s just Toyota. It could be worse. Sad to see Microsoft pandering to them with a Showcase event in FH4, though.

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Sony have a terrible reputation. All of their first PS3’s died after a year. They are still recovering from that.

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Did they? Mine’s still going strong nearly 13 years on.

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I used to always joke about how it was just shear racism how Toyota removed all of it cars from all racing games except GT. Japanese car manufacturer only wants it’s cars in Japanese games… Yeah I know, not true at all, but… Meh.

But all jokes aside though, with the way everything is going with license deals and such, this doesn’t surprise me at all, soon as all the manufacturers saw how coveted porsche became in games after the EA exclusivity deal, of course they’re all going to want a bit of that exclusive pie.

No doubt in the near future, with the way things are going, all manufacturers are going to hold their licencing rights to highest bidder.

It’s just a shame Toyota is being so stingy with their licencing, I would love to see some of their cars in the new racing games coming out.

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[Mod Edit - Trolling removed - D]

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We just hope we get the return of Toyota soon. Just gotta have hope.

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Well, at least this means I won’t need to worry about spinning a Prius on the wheel.

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Hot Wheels hasn’t even included Toyota cars in their lines for the last couple years. Same problem is going on with Hot Wheels as it is with Video Game companies? I guess so.