When information is shared in a small circle, the number of possible sources of a leak is small. When that circle includes people bound by NDAs and people not bound by NDAs, the finger of suspicion would be at the people not bound by NDAs. That's pretty much only GTPlanet.
The first solution to a leak is to lessen the circle - and that'd mean cutting GTP off from future information shares.
I'm fine with believing that there are legal repurcussions. Think about these two scenarios:
1) Someone sets up a track in GT, gets good at it, then runs it in real life and wrecks. The judge asks what was happening, and the driver replies, "Honestly, I NEVER had that problem in the game!"
Ummmm.... not good....
2) Someone goes to a favorite track, edits it into GT and shares it. The track is out the royalties for having THEIR property in the game, and it doesn't look right because the detail PD puts into getting it right was not done.
Court cases happen and PD goes bankrupt due to losing so much money paying royalties.
Ummm.... not good.....
So, if it comes down to legal stuff, I'm fine with waiting for it to be straightened out.
So for anyone who hasn't really paid a whole lot of attention, the situation on course maker right now is probably so legal that the costs would bankrupt all Course maker supporters.
(I COULD BE WRONG SO DON'T TAKE THIS AS GOSPEL)
Should the reason turn out to be legal, as it seems to be right now, there is another factor to consider. Mr. Yamauchi said once or twice in interviews that he really liked the creator in Modnation Racers. I messed around with it again last night, and it is really great save for some things I would like to have but that game is a bit too cartoony for. Consider that it could be so great in PD's eyes that they copied it, via something of a loophole they could have found in that game's copyrighting. San Diego Studio would not have liked that, as you could imagine, and have now taken legal action to either take back what is theirs or get some amount of money for the rights to use the tech PD copied.
I don't believe the first situation TRL suggested is possible for a few reasons. Any average Joe that bought the game and then got the course maker with GPS creator would think hey great, I'm going to do a track day at XXXXXXXX Raceway and get the track then. Of course he's on a track day so he's belting around all the corners, hitting and missing apexes, getting that track. Now he takes it back home, puts it in GT, and starts practicing his heart out. What Joe probably doesn't realize is that he's really not driving XXXXXXXX Raceway, but instead his driving line from that track, which would soften the corners in the game. The only way he would be accurately be driving that track in the game is if he drove right down the centre of the track. What he needed to do was to drive the real track for one lap down the very centre and do his recording. Even then, it's still not going to be exactly accurate to the real thing because of the phone used being in the car and car bodies roll and suspension compresses and extends on hills. So hopefully any sensible judge would realize this and say, no you didn't drive the real track in your game, case dismissed.
You could sort of argue the same thing for the royalties but that is a bit of a grey area because the end user had to use track property to create the track for the game. This could be remedied by PD notifying all tracks that their app is coming out and that they should come to an agreement on whether game end users can record their track or not. That's a lot of work though so PD might not be willing to do that when all they seemed to have meant it for was for public roads or blank fields.
Any way you look at it, NDA's seem to have been signed, but not by one of the privy parties (that's these guys running the show here) and the fact that Mr. Yamauchi would have likely signed one of these agreements and then disclosed to Jordan and Famine, could mean legal repercussions for him and PD if one of the other parties finds the posts of Famine saying he knows.
So
@Famine thank you for attempting as much as possible to keep us in the loop without bringing truly explosive attention to PD. When Course Maker comes out hopefully the situation will be explained, but if not at least we'll have Course Maker.
TL DR: Things are probably legal right now between PD and someone else and Famine is doing his best to inform us without tipping off this someone else who could be watching but there are still a great many ungrateful people on the forums berating PD and GTPlanet.
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