I have just seen a trailer appear on my FB feed for the Battlefield 4 campaign and on the still screen there is a BMW in background. Now the modelling on this is OK but it is obviously nothing on par with a BMW from Forza or GT so this got me thinking, do devs ever sell on any of their models. For instance would it really be harmful to Turn 10 to sell a few car models (with the intricacies stripped out) to DICE or is it more cost effective for devs to develop their own stuff?
I can't imagine it is easy to port models from one engine to another, also cars in forza are the star and will be resource intensive, in BF4 they are a prop. Priorities and that.
From a technical point of view striping stuff out isn't as easy as it seems. Pulling out interiors etc is easy enough but the actual shell of the car will likely be a bit high and depending on how uit is modelled could be more work to deal with than starting fresh.
The difference in poly counts between two models is likely higher than most would realise as that extra 10% needed takes a lot of polys.
Technically I'm sure a transport set agreeable to most tools could be derived - would require buy-in from the vendors of course but using XML for data transports allows for format conversions etc.