You know this how?
Asset creation (and the sale of created assets) does not carry with it the licence to then commercially use those assets if the copyright for them is held by someone else.
SMS may well of sold completed assets to Reiza (which would have saved them dev time and money), but Reiza would almost certainly still need to have licenced them for commercial use from the brands involved.
But why would S4S not have the exact same capability? To purchase their assets they created for PC2 back from Reiza, license those they had to and rename those they could get away with and avoid licensing fees altogether (Northampton etc).
It would have given S4S the same advantage Reiza had going into AMS2, free up dev time to concentrate on new assets.
I'm a little confused about why S4S are supposed to face any more restrictions than Reiza had. AMS went from a game with a pretty unique, mostly S. American focus, to AMS2 with that S American track list, and lo and behold, a whole bunch of PC2 tracks! And PC2 cars.
The only difference is that Reiza publicly acknowledged the purchase of those assets, but there's no law that says they HAD to. As long as the sale is legal, it's done. It might also explain why so few tracks in PMR. SMS didn't sell Reiza their entire track list, just a bunch of the more popular European tracks. Seems that those are the ones S4S would purchase back, buying the S American ones would make it little more than an AMS2 clone.
I mean, yes, it's doubtful either of us will know for sure, but my theory at least fits the facts. S4S were coding PMR on a shoestring. Reclaiming the PC2 assets they had sold would have been an obvious move if they couldn't get them from Codemasters or EA. All that would remain would be the licensing. Seems S4S found a way around even that in some cases.
TL : DR... If Reiza could do it, so could S4S
