La situazione riguardo il nuovo simulatore online gratuito dedicato al marchio Porsche e targato AutomaniaX continua ad essere abbastanza nebulosa, nonostante proprio oggi la stessa AutomaniaX provi a chiarire la situazione in modo ufficiale a tutti gli utenti:
We also got a lot of request about the dev team behind our racing simulation. At this stage we can say it is not Slightly Mad Studios from UK. As we are a community project we are also using the power of our community to develop our simulation, but the strength of our own studio as well. We are using super talented race developers from the modding community to create a racing simulation which is as close to the expectations of our community as possible. Also we can state at this point that the rFactor1 engine is not the basis for our future development – this is just for our tech guys out there.
Per contro, Ian Bell degli SMS fa invece sapere il suo punto di vista tramite VirtualR e non sembra essere propriamente d'accordo:
We have emails from Porsche’s head of marketing clearly stating to their CAD people that they are developing a game in cooperation with us.We fully expected a company with the reputation of Porsche to operate professionally, This was a fully playable build installed on a simulator (that we also specced and partly paid for). It’s very clear that our property has been exploited and abused and we’ll be approaching both Automaniax and Porsche in no uncertain terms. We’re taking legal advice ongoing. In short were owed a substantial amount of money, into the high six figures and we clearly feel we’ve been led down the garden path by a company we had the utmost respect for. I have two Porsches myself for goodness sake.Reading the latest news article from Automaniax is interesting. I wonder how much ISI was paid for Automaniax’s use of the rfactor engine. I’d give 10 to 1 odds ISI hasn’t even been approached with a permission request, let alone a contract for fair payment. My personal opinion? We don’t need crap like this in our community.
