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Don’t Pay for Sim Racing Mods!

Posted on March 26th, 2010 in Other Sim Racing – 18 Comments

A new cancer is spreading in our community as several readers have notified me of a couple of websites that have started selling sim racing mods to uninformed users. I won’t link to these sites because I don’t want this problem to spread any further, I think it’s time for a warning message though.

I know that most of the community’s veterans are well aware of this but many users browse for mods via Google and will hopefully read this:

There are absolutely no legit modding teams out there selling their work! In the sim racing community, mods are always available for free – Don’t let anyone scam you!

The mods on these sites are either the same stuff you get completely for free on legit sites or low-quality conversions of cars extracted from other titles like Need for Speed Shift – Needles to say that this is completely illegal.

If you´re looking for mods, there are several legit sites out there where cars and tracks can be downloaded completely for free

NoGripRacing

Racedepartment.com

GTR4U

RacingFR

VirtualR’s Download List

and others…

None of these sites will ever ask you for money to download material. Don’t shed out hard-earned cash for something that you can get for free on other sites or some dirty conversion someone has thrown together in less than five minutes.

GTOmegaRacing.com

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  • spamsac

    Does anyone know if these sites have been reported to the copyright owners in the case of converted work or the creators in the case of mods?

    Surely the financial/legal clout of the owners of ripped/converted work is the quickest and most likely way of getting these sites taken down and the people behind them being held to account.

  • ZombieJim

    If you go all the way to the actual copyright owners, I worry that they’d demand the mods released for free on sites like this should be taken down as well. I think this needs to be a community effort based around simply spreading awareness.

    As for the original creators of the mods; If they didn’t know before, they do now.

  • spamsac

    Just to stress, when I say the copyright owners, I mean the dev teams not the manufacturers. I don’t see why the likes of EA would want to stop people modding their games when it does them a favour, but they most definitely would want to stop people selling their content for other games.

  • ZombieJim

    I agree with you – they don’t want someone selling their content to other games. But bringing them into the scene to deal with this could cause things to spiral.

    No freely produced mod with real world vehicles/companies in it is technically legal, regardless of their appreciation for all the free advertising they get. It’s a sort of gentleman’s agreement as such which lets them exist. This coupled with the superb quality of so many fan-produced mods means they often end up creating competition with commercially made games. For example, if IPM’s FSOne 2010 looks as good as their 2009 does now, I doubt I’m going to buy codies offering unless it really blows my goddam socks off. And I put my socks on pretty tight.

  • Panchito

    :haha: :haha: :haha:

    This is unacceptable…

  • roadkill ken

    One word to describe them

    SCUM

  • felipe

    Interesting Rob to see you talking about this now as it’s being going on for a while and everybody just blamed SRW when clearly there’re lots of other people and sites making money out of free mods. Be it allowing only paying members to race certain events and mods or hosting mod files and charging access to download them and through other means as well.

  • f0xx

    F*CK them :ooo: :ooo:

    (pardon the language)

  • Skillcoil

    (URL removed)

    I wonder if this is legal. I mean look at that /jaw drop

  • http://www.virtualr.net Montoya

    Skillcoil: (URL removed)I wonder if this is legal. I mean look at that /jaw drop

    No it’s not, that’s one of the sites in question. Please don’t post these URLs here, thanks!

  • gtrNL

    Good post. Hope it can save some people there money.

  • Daheee

    roadkill ken: One word to describe them SCUM

    You got that right!!

  • http://www.bsimracing.com Arnold Carter Wong

    that fucking site has stolen the WSGT1 FXX.

  • Deano

    I’ve even seen people trying to sell someone else’s mod thru ebay. All this just goes to prove their are some sorry-ass people in the world.

    As far as I’m concerned these people are nothing but common thief’s. They should be taken outside and cained repeatedly.

  • Gonzas

    sad.

  • stabiz

    As other have said, this is not unique to sim racing. I remember GWX (a super-duper mod for Silent Hunter 3) being sold on the net by some low life as well.

  • RG

    Montoya:
    There are absolutely no legit modding teams out there selling their work! In the sim racing community, mods are always available for free – Don’t let anyone scam you!

    I disagree with you, there are modders/mod teams negotiating and receiving licensing fees from SRW, then SRW sells their work for them.

    Now ISI is making exclusive deals with SRW/RSC. I wouldn’t be surprised if ISI and SRW/RSC have been in bed together all along.

  • raisen1964

    At least one of those sites may have been leeching capacity from their employers servers. Tracking them back with domaintools, then finding some google cache results gave the author of the site. If anyone is in a position to legally kick some butt, we need to hook up so I can pass the information on. The domain in question was based in Hungary I think. Just back from a holiday and would need to consult my notes from last week.

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