Gran Turismo Partners With Getty Images for Virtual Motorsport Photography

"oh you take photographs of racing cars for a living?"

edit: for clarity, I'm pretty cynical about this, it removes a massive element of trackside photography and in the virtual world there's no excuse for anything but excellence... and the photo's posted so far, are average, even by virtual standards.
 
Just so people are aware, as the pricings look ridiculous, Getty's not selling images to you and me.

Getty Images is essentially an enormous library resource for industry - for marketing and comms, media, design, advertising, and so on. The implication of having GT featured in these image banks is to put esports images right next to motorsports images for professionals who work in these industries. £350 is not a lot for a business to pay for an image like that - a freelance motorsport photographer may charge that or more for a single image.

This isn't a "great for players" story directly, but a "good for gaming/esports gaining wider exposure" story (which may make it great for players down the line).
 
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But then why buy licenses for these pictures when there's literally hundreds of very similar ones available for basically free ? (*taken by average joes that won't even be mad when they'll see someone has used their picture). Or, you know, even just buy a console and the game for the license's price and you can take all the pictures you want and use them. Real life photography requires a substantial investment and skills, pre and post prod, but a monkey could take a good picture in GTS.

I don't see this being a super lucrative business, but hey, it's also basically costing them nothing. What's worrying is this could go downhill very fast easily if someone just decided to ban players from saving some replays or taking pictures from them.
 
But then why buy licenses for these pictures when there's literally hundreds of very similar ones available for basically free ? (*taken by average joes that won't even be mad when they'll see someone has used their picture). Or, you know, even just buy a console and the game for the license's price and you can take all the pictures you want and use them. Real life photography requires a substantial investment and skills, pre and post prod, but a monkey could take a good picture in GTS.

I don't see this being a super lucrative business, but hey, it's also basically costing them nothing. What's worrying is this could go downhill very fast easily if someone just decided to ban players from saving some replays or taking pictures from them.
The images are exclusively of the actual esports: the Top 16 Superstars races and the live World Tour events. They're not just any old picture that anyone can create - though whether the fact the Superstars races are included might affect the players in the events who want to generate their own images is an unanswered question - and there's also the time angle of staging and creating the right shot as opposed to heading to the image bank.

In addition, many businesses have standing deals with Getty Images, and image libraries like it. They could use the images free of charge (on an editorial basis) because they pay for the service already.
 
Top 16 replays can be and are often shared. World Tour events would require to download the replica liveries that never fail to be created by the community, and have a few people stage the scenes in a lobby, but technically you could recreate them. We did that for one of our events when we forgot to take a replay.

Also, the image shown is literally a 10 minutes effort max. I know some companies won't even think of how easy it is and how much money they could save, but someone who isn't on a standing deal could potentially save thousands on a single article. But then again, I have a photographer friend who gets his pictures stolen on a weekly basis with watermarks cropped or photoshoped.

But the fact a third party company is trying to make money from this is not a concern. What I'm worried about is the fact that this could lead to a new form of microtransactions or feature-locks in the gaming industry, while the effect of an out-of-context videogame picture on esports exposure will be minimal.
 
Man, what a time to be alive. I always loved the camera in Gran Turismo games. I don't really remember what the GT4 one was like, but the GT5 one actually got me into real-world photography because it was essentially a DSLR simulator (minus shutter speed being accurately simulated and some settings being physically impossible, but still). And with the GT Sport camera now containing basic but powerful editing tools (WB, tint, layer masks,curve adjustments, etc.), I was wondering if anything like this would end up happening. This is super neat.
 
The images are exclusively of the actual esports: the Top 16 Superstars races and the live World Tour events. They're not just any old picture that anyone can create - though whether the fact the Superstars races are included might affect the players in the events who want to generate their own images is an unanswered question - and there's also the time angle of staging and creating the right shot as opposed to heading to the image bank.

In addition, many businesses have standing deals with Getty Images, and image libraries like it. They could use the images free of charge (on an editorial basis) because they pay for the service already.
Hmm, sounds like the "that ain't free content" argument, from some folk on here. :sly::lol:
 
Am I the only one disappointed that the news went in another direction? When i started reading this I got excited thinking finally a big third party recognizes the talent of people playing the game that can also take stunning shots and edit them.

I thought they were gonna have a competition or hire top rated popular people for these occasions, not that they themselves will take these photos. Comon, we been doing this for almost 3 years, give recognition to the GT community.
 
If they want $350 per image then I guess Sony is getting a licensing kickback?

The way I think about it is that there's a fair few online races by real world race drivers during the shutdown.

Surely any footage of imagery from said video is the property of the DTM or Aus Supercars or whoever had agreed to pay for iracing to produce the event.

Sure you can capture the footage and create your own stills but you cant really profit from it.

In this case, Getty can.
 
Just so people are aware, as the pricings look ridiculous, Getty's not selling images to you and me.

Getty Images is essentially an enormous library resource for industry - for marketing and comms, media, design, advertising, and so on. The implication of having GT featured in these image banks is to put esports images right next to motorsports images for professionals who work in these industries. £350 is not a lot for a business to pay for an image like that - a freelance motorsport photographer may charge that or more for a single image.

This isn't a "great for players" story directly, but a "good for gaming/esports gaining wider exposure" story (which may make it great for players down the line).

Considering how there are sports photographers who have pointed out that sports photography over the years has degraded into a bland, 'shoot it and get it over with' mess as Getty Images has become more and more prevalent within that space (all the while websites and newspapers slashed photography jobs and subsequently outsourced them to freelancers working under Getty) and any sort of actually stimulating photographs have increasingly gone by the wayside for an army of people that are more or less pointing a camera and shooting over an event with no real flair or panache, I'm not exactly convinced that it's a good thing to have the same set up for eSports events.
 
Well its quite clear that esports wants to reach the same level of banality and commericalism as 'real' sports so there's that. What's more mainstream than Getty?

I know in the backs of your minds everyone knows what kind of company Getty really is.
 
I am very happy that GTsport was chosen to show the skills of your camera. I have like 2000 photos and as the sale season started, I can make 0.50 € each, and also 0.99 € each car design.:confused:
 
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- Tag Heuer
- Hamilton
- Michelin
- Senna
- Getty Images

I would like the effort to hire trinkets to be the same as closing deals with more real circuits, more modern cars and even with famous competitions, such as DTM, Blancpain and WEC.

No offense. Seriously.
 
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