Worked on both of these games (FnF Crossroads & pCARS 3), hopefully my comment does not get lost. This video is literally a documentary of my time at SMS. I signed on right as they were about to release pCars 2/start on pCars 3, and then left (not really lol) right as the run of pC3 DLC ended. That alone is a wild story unto itself.
pCars 3 from what I recall was dictated by misinterpreting pCars 2 sales figures.
The original pCars generated massive sales figures for SMS on day one, primarily because in 2015 GT Sport was delayed and there was no racing sim on the PS4 yet. When pCars 2 didn't match those immediate insane sales figures, the decision was made that sim racing is too finicky of a market, and to try their hand at a Horizon-style offshoot.
In reality, pCars 2 sold very well over it's total lifetime, so this shift in direction was ill-advised and in hindsight shouldn't have happened. It is my professional opinion that pC3 failed because SMS didn't really comprehend what made the Shift games great. Shift was intended to be used as the blueprint but nobody really made an effort to ensure the Shift formula was there - things like obnoxiously loud engine sounds, aggressive visual effects, moody menus, and a grandiose soundtrack. We settled on rainbow menus, dubstep, and very uninspired car sounds. It was like they didn't understand why people liked Shift.
In mid 2019 when deep in development it really did remind me of PGR, albeit with pCars content. The game drove great with a pad and the AI was fun to race wheel-to-wheel with on higher difficulties. Portimao I recall being a highlight in GT3 cars. We didn't get all AI quirks dialed out that are a staple of isi/Madness engine games, but I was pretty satisfied especially because we had close to a year of fine tuning ahead of us. But once the overlords stepped in and demanded the AI to act a certain way, the entire experience fell apart IMO. They wanted road racing to be pack-based like NASCAR is, which literally doesn't work if you have even one iota of knowledge about road racing. Didn't matter.
Some of the crazier ****, like 6-wide starts at Fuji, thankfully never got into the release build. Not because it was immediately canned after one playtest, but because someone (me) spoke up and asked why we were intentionally generating chaotic 6-wide starts when we simultaneously had an online safety rating system that punished any sort of contact.
Two further things did us in.
Codies suggested a name change from pCars Revolution to pCars 3 at the last minute. The original name you can see Ian reference on twitter and in some promo shots. Codies had just taken over SMS & were worried it would confuse investors to have two arcade racers from the same company, competing against each other on the market at the same time - Grid 19 and pCars R. By changing the name from pCars R to pCars 3, they theorized the investors would understand that one was arcade and one was sim. Dead serious. This also resulted in crazy ****, like our physics guys having to write blog entries about how "realistic" our very obviously arcade racer was. In my opinion that put them in a very strange spot and messed with their personal reputations, as they had their real names slapped on blog posts that the sim community laughed at.
So instead of people knowing it was a Shift-style offshoot and to give it a pass if it wasn't your thing, we all had to double down and pretend like this neutered experience was indeed the future of sim racing.
We also recycled too much content. 95% of the car/track roster is stuff directly copy/pasted from pCars 2, with some tire updates and draft scalars improved (you'll notice drafting in pC3 is a lot more realistic than pC2 - you're welcome).
Had we taken a more focused approach - just street cars only - and maybe street circuits only as opposed to literally the entire pCars 2 track roster, people would have understood that yeah, it's just a lighthearted PGR-style racer, and you can upgrade or paint your car if you want to. If you sell that for $30, maybe $40, it does well and holds people over until the next major release.
Instead it pissed off our core fanbase and coupled with the launch of Crossroads, made them swear off buying games from SMS.
