Articles
New Forza Update Is Good News for Xbox Fans
A new Forza update from the head of Xbox Phil Spencer, is good news for Xbox fans, or at least many Xbox fans. Some may actually find the update to not be good news, depending on their preferences. Before Forza Horizon was released in 2012, there was just Forza Motorsport. For those who don’t know the difference between the two is, the former is more of an arcade racing style, complete with an open world, while the latter is track-based and more of a hardcore racing sim. They are also made by different studios. The former is made by Playground Games, while the latter is made by Turn 10 Studios.
Very quickly, the spin-off surpassed the core series and became far more popular and more critically acclaimed. While this happened, interest in Forza Motorsport declined. To this end, the most recent Forza Horizon game, Forza Horizon 5 has a 92 on Metacritic and over 20 million players. It’s the biggest success Xbox has had during the Xbox Series X generation, as highlighted in our glowing review of it. By contrast, the latest Forza Motorsport game came out two years later in 2023 to a solid 84 on Metacritic, but very poor user reviews. And it did not sell well nor drive much Xbox Game Pass engagement. Suffice to say, you could imagine that Xbox is heavily invested in Forza Horizon, but not Forza Motorsport. And it is. Forza Horizon 6 is set to release next year, while Forza Motorsport has been put on ice. For fans of the latter, this is obviously disappointing, but the good news for these same fans is that the aforementioned Phil Spencer insists it is not permanently on ice.
Phil Spencer Update
“Forza Motorsport, we sometimes need to shift our focus to games that are released sooner,” said Spencer, speaking to Famistu. “We understand the reaction many people had when we scaled back Turn 10 Studios. We have a large number of games we want to support carefully, and sometimes we give development teams a little more time to avoid putting them under strain. Our current structure allows us this flexibility.”
Now, if you enjoy Forza Horizon but not Forza Motorsport, maybe this update is not great news, as it would be better for Turn 10 Studios to shift its focus to assisting in the development of Forza Horizon games, assuming this would be an option. There are fans of the latter and not the former, though, and for these fans who were worried it had no future, well, according to Spencer, it does.
All of that said, and as always, feel free to leave a comment letting us know what you think, or join the conversation over on the ComicBook Forum. Should Xbox focus on Forza Horizon only or keep releasing Forza Motorsport games as well?
The post New Forza Update Is Good News for Xbox Fans appeared first on ComicBook.com.
