I wish when you licensed the league, you got all the cars and drivers within the league. I'm wondering if S3S has to purchase licensing for Audi, BMW, and Mercedes for DTM or if they just purchase a blanket license for all Audi, BMW, and Mercedes (which might have made DTM92 possible). I'd imagine we'll never know that, but it's curious to me why ADAC would license the series to S3S but only the series name and trademark and not the cars in the series as well. I know in the US, NASCAR sells rights to the series, tracks, and cars to one company (and not very good ones haha).
It's the same with the Champions League licence in Pro Evolution Soccer. The licence entitles them to use the Champions League name, branding, sponsors, music and host stadium for the final, but nothing else. All teams and stadia have to be licensed individually and many are missing.
The governing organisation (in this case ADAC) cannot superseed individuals's deals.Think of NBA Live with Jordan ,Barkley and Shaq in the 90's or F1 official games with Jacques Villeneuve in 1996 to 1998 and Colin McRae's deal with Codemasters that made him out of reach for Evolution Studios official WRC games.
This is a complex one. Some series may have a "full licensing deal" as you can have for Formula1 or DTM. But the most is about licensing the series names and rules, then it's up to the manufacturer to deal for they own brand. On the formula1 Licence, Ferrari as no choice, and can't do anything against the one who purchase the F1 licence, because it's part of the agreement of their participation of F1 championship. But with series like GT's, it's much harder to have a full series that include the brand's name. For that the series should have it's own brand to be stronger enough that the manufacturer can't go against. DTM, NASCAR, Formula1, etc are very powerfull series...
All of these licensing deals depend on contracts made. I remember that I once read about why there are Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches in GTR/GTR2. As far as I remember it was said that the deal could be made with the FIA because somehow the contract to participate in FIA GT1/GT2 included the rights on the cars taking part, so SIMBIN could buy all car licenses within one deal with the FIA. That's all more or less hearsay but it looked reasonable to me when I read it. Maybe @Jay Ekkel could eleborate on this if he wants to and correct me if I'm wrong here. And regarding licenses from the VAG group. Looking at the amount of Audis we have in RRRE, it seems that it's not always difficult to obtain a license from a VAG company. It looks like all companies under the roof of VAG are free to make their own decisions regarding licensing deals. But long story short, I think that making license deals is always a difficult task and can depend on many variables which we have in most cases no insight to. On a personal note I'd like to add that the efforts of S3S in balancing the cars so that every car can be a winner are second to none. This might not always reflect reality to 100% but it is what reality tries to accomplish nowadays with BoP. And it is in my opinion the reason why manufacturers shouldn't be so picky about giving their licenses to S3S. They will for sure not be represented in a bad way.
I don't know about the new Gallardo or the Huracán but last year's Gallardo was so silent that you could hardly hear it in the GT Masters field. Same goes for the McLaren MP4-12C GT3. I'm not joking...!
I think Anthony could make a Yugo sound great but thats just me. The license did expire I believe for GTR2 for Porsche and Ferrari. There's a way to get them back, but we'll not mention that here.
Speaking about licensing: Porsche will return to Forza Horizon 2 and Motorsport 6 via a deal between MS, Porsche and EA. So just like with Forza 4, MS pays EA to get a deal. That must be extremely unnecessarily expensive. http://www.autoblog.com/2015/06/08/porsche-returns-forza-horizon-2-expansion-video/