ATS Truck Licensing Situation Update

We still owe you clarification on the initial set of trucks shipping as part of the first release of American Truck Simulator. We have been postponing this post until the last minute, as the situation could – and still can – always change (and for the better only now), but we need to be clear at last on where we are.

Over the past year, we have been publishing quite a lot of screenshots and videos showing several in-development truck models. Our fans have quite sharp eyes and take note of all the details, so people are naturally speculating on what’s coming based on those shots.

Until recently, we were planning to include at least four trucks at launch, and our screenshots shown over time reflected this optimism. Unfortunately, finalizing the licensing talks and getting all the vehicles past the approval clearance is taking longer than anticipated, and you may have noticed some of those trucks no longer showing in the most recent batches of pictures from the game.

The result is that out of the gate, the game will ship with just two trucks.

Thanks to kind support of PACCAR group, we are happy to confirm the presence of Kenworth T 680 and Peterbilt 579 as part of the launch line-up.

Kenworth T 680 licensed courtesy of PACCAR

Peterbilt 579 licensed courtesy of PACCAR

After the game is released and gets into media spotlight, we will have a very important tool in our licensing talks arsenal – a successful game (fingers crossed) aimed at the relevant market. Licensing talks are often resembling the “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” problem. To obtain a license in a highly specialized field, you just don’t walk into a store and get it over the counter. Unlike car manufacturers who have extensive experience with being featured in racing games, for most truck manufacturers this is all unexplored territory. We always need to find a way inside the company to reach the decision makers at marketing/licensing department, and getting our voice noticed is not easy. Just getting the chance to get out point across is often all it takes, and with American Truck Simulator out in playable form and in the hands of customers, it gives us a crucial talking point.

When the game is out on the market already at last, when we can prove its impact on trucking fans at large, we hope for more of the truck manufacturers to pay attention, to realize that it’s beneficial for them to participate, and perhaps even push us to hurry so that they are not left behind the pack. We have been through this experience with the launch of Euro Truck Simulator 2, when vocal support of our fans managed to bring the game to the attention to European truck manufacturers missing in the initial version of the game.

We have progressed very well on several additional vehicles, and in the weeks after release, we are confident that will get the clearance to start adding them to the game. We will be adding them for free of course as part of regular game updates, just as is the case with the ETS2.

Kenworth W900 will appear in ATS soon courtesy of PACCAR

Peterbilt 389 will appear in ATS soon courtesy of PACCAR

Now comes the time for an explicit disclaimer – any vehicles and truck brands you will see pictured below this point in text are here only for illustrative purposes, and do not constitute any guarantee that they will be appearing in the game in any particular timeframe. We have implemented them as an experiment when trying to get the door opened. As you can see some of them are already in advanced enough stage to be technically prepared for integration into the game world, yet more are semi-finished and not yet ready for integration with the game engine.

A beautiful truck spotted somewhere north of Los Angeles

A valiant truck driven across a landmark Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco

A Maya render of another cool but only semi-finished truck

Meanwhile, we are still hard at work improving Euro Truck Simulator 2. As we are showing a ton of North American vehicles today, we did not want our European fans to feel betrayed. So we thought that a teaser image of a new truck being readied for introduction to ETS2 will cheer them up today.

Renault Range T spotted somewhere in south of France