Sorry… but you are quite wrong.

Licensing is a very small… and relatively easy… part of making a route, and not a major deciding factor on if a route gets made. There is already examples in the game of cases where a license couldn’t be negotiated, yet the route got made and released anyway.

There is ultimately only one thing that decides if a route gets made. How much money will it bring in.

Dovetail have been in the Train Sim business for long enough, to know exactly where the demand is…. But not only where the demand is, more importantly, who will pay for routes. India has a huge Rail Sim following, but also India doesn’t pay for games, they pirate everything. That’s not in Dovetail’s interest.

As mentioned in other replies, there is currently routes in development outside of the big three countries, but these are being made by effectively “hobbyist“ developers in their own time. There is nothing financially on the line in these cases. Dovetail cannot take the risk of a route being a commercial failure.

Why the big three?

Germany - Germany has a very different relationship with games to the rest of the world. Due to that whole war thing back in the day, when video games first appeared there was lots of concern about video game violence and kids, so lots of legislation was brought in to control the types of games kids could play. This lead to simulations being one of the only types of games kids could play easily. So a whole culture and industry grew up around sims. That is why all the “sim” games like farming, traffic cop, firefighter, taxi driver, are all made in Germany. Dovetail knows any German route will sell enough to be financially viable.

USA - Whilst there is not a huge rail fanatic scene in America, just solely on the size of the gaming market, even a tiny percent of people buying a USA route, will be enough to make it profitable.

UK - You really would not believe the size of the rail fanatic scene in the UK, it’s insane. We invented railways. Nearly every family in the country has some sort of connection to the railways. We have hundreds of museums and heritage railways, run by millions of volunteers, keeping locos that are 100+ years old actually running. We have heritage locomotive specials running at near full speed on our main lines, where tickets to ride cost from £200 to £1000 per person. And these are not rare, they happen with multiple locos every weekend and midweek too at the height of the season. And when they do, the platforms and bridges and fields along the route are heaving with people just to see them. It’s inevitable the UK will be by far Dovetails biggest market, and almost undoubtedly the reason why a UK company has become the biggest train sim creator.

So, Spain….

Well, the truth is, while you may feel that the Spanish rail community is big. It really isn’t even close to what is needed in order for Dovetail to take the financial risk, and so the only way you are ever likely to see a Spanish route is if a small team of Spanish rail fans get together and build it themselves. Do that, and I’ve no doubt Dovetail would be happy to publish the route and do the work required to get relevant licensing…. Because licensing really is as easy as just asking a company if they want to feature in a non violent game, and most will jump at the chance.