The marketing department has demanded that hosting site RaceDepartment remove all of the user-created F1 licensed mods from its library, including mods for Automobilista, F1 2013 and F1 2014.
According to racing game site Pretend Race Cars. ”The Codemasters line of Formula One simulators ship each year with a fictional Williams F1 livery – omitting the iconic Martini logos and colors – forcing users to manually edit the team’s car skin in a quest for maximum authenticity. Formula One has now stepped in, and officially disallowed this kind of harmless dedication from continuing, along with cracking down on users who merely update the game’s default liveries throughout the year with proper decal placements.”
For those who follow Formula One racing, the sport itself is in decline, thanks to questionable business practices such as removing iconic races from the circuit like the German Grand Prix, and hosting races instead in questionable locations such as Bahrain, Russia, China and Azerbaijan (and drawing parallels to FIFA’s corruption.) The new qualifying system has only embarrassed the sport further.
Doubtless, gamers will exchange the mods through the slower, old-fashioned method of direct download via fan sites (which will have to be unlisted to avoid the monitoring by the Formula One rights holders). However, it’s widely considered that these draconian actions only harm the sport, instead of growing it.
