When Forza Motorsport 4 arrives in stores this fall, it’s going to come packing more than 500 cars spread across more than 80 manufacturers. That’s great stuff, except for the fact that one name you won’t be seeing is Porsche.
There’s a reason for this, as Turn 10 Studios creative director Dan Greenwalt explains in a newly posted update on the official Forza website. It appears that the absence of the car manufacturer from the game has everything to do with Electronic Arts, which has collaborated with Turn 10 for Porsche with a sub-licensing deal since the first game in the series. EA elected to not renew that commitment for Forza 4, and so the car is out.
Writing that “this kills me,” Greenwalt goes on to say that “we’ve asked our contacts at EA to reconsider their position frequently and regularly over the last 18 months. We also reached out to various influential people in gaming to lobby on our behalf, and on your behalf, but that was to no avail.”
“While we respect EA’s need to run their business as they see fit, we’ve regularly collaborated in the past and hope we can find our way back to that approach,” he continued. “Forza had the exclusive license for all Ferrari cars, for example, on the Xbox and PC platforms. But at the end of the day, we’ve always found that we just weren’t willing to block other racing games from having Ferraris outright, as we believed that this would do nothing but hurt the racing ecosystem.”
Greenwalt makes some good points (he has more to say too– click the link above), and EA hasn’t yet come out with an official response. That doesn’t change the facts though: there will be no Porsche in Forza 4.
