Honestly makes me wonder why we don't just bombard Turn 10 Studio's social media accounts with requests and petitions to take legal action against RTM and such. Clearly they haven't been paying attention or else RTM wouldn't exist right now. We're always talking about how bad/immoral they are and why they shouldn't exist, and that method seems like the most clear-cut way for them to get taken down IMO.
RTM is an organization that directly profits from the sales of their "products", so they are a business. Microsoft is also a business and they're currently having their property stolen and regurgitated for ludicrous prices to us and they don't even know it. I'd really love to see some legal action finally taken against RTM in some form as a sort of cruel irony for their false-takedowns they do to bully the AC community.
There is a couple of reasons that allow companies like Simdream or RTM to do what they are doing:
1. It is in nobody's interest in the business (developer companies) that AC is still doing so good as it is. Nobody is making money out of that. Quite the contrary, they are loosing money. Because AC is still being so widely played, people don't buy other sims. If there were no AC, people would buy more new sims. And this popularity comes mainly from the moding community. I believe that developer companies now believe it was a mistake on creating products that allow fairly easy modding of their products, cause it prolongs the life span of a product, effectively stopping people from buying new products when they come out. I think we will never see a new product released from a money making company as open as AC was. It just makes no financial sense for them
2. Amateur developers do this for free. And as such spend their free time doing development. A vast majority just don't have the time, knowledge and resources to go fight a legal battle with someone, who more than obviously has all of the above. The end result usually being: "I don't need this ****, I do this for free. If I can't do this in peace, I'll just stop doing it." And in the end they just walk away.
3. Every type of moding is in somewhat of a gray area. Everybody is at least in part using resources from somewhere/somebody else, so they can't really legally protect their work from being stolen and used later on.
4. These "companies" on the other hand have clearly identified the loop holes. They operate from countries where such practises are obviously possible, they have studied the law and have the resources and knowledge to force their way on everybody. They know perfectly well that they are fighting a battle against amateurs and that they can basically bully their way through.
It sucks, we all love and respect the effort and talent the developers are putting in for free. But sadly we live in a world where doing thing for free is "against the rules" of how thing work. If somebody wants to make money from something they unfortunately have more rights and more legal protection than someone who does same things for free. It's a ****** world, but that is just the way things are. The only way to fight against is to stop supporting and buying their stuff so that they loose interest in what they are doing. But obviously they still sell enough products that it is worth their while.
In the end we might see companies making pressure on Kunos and Studio397 to somehow stop the modding of their products all together (with some must install patches on steam that prevents mods from being loaded into a game for example), especially if the sales of their new products will suffer from people not buying new products in adequate numbers. Cause no matter how good an engine they develop, and how good the graphics get, they will never be able to compete with the volume of content available in AC. I counted the other day, i have 55 unique historical and modern championship fields with almost all the liveries and all the tracks that these competitions ran on (and i'm counting only the quality ones and not counting street cars and street tracks). The licensing for this alone would cost so much that there is no way to make a product that would sell in enough high numbers to make a product profitable.
