Forza Motorsport 4 won’t have Porsches due to license block from EA

Considering that Porsches have been featured in just about every racing sim released over the past ten years, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to expect at least a few Porsches to be featured in Forza Motorsport 4‘s lineup. Unfortunately, they won’t be.

As producer Tom Greenawalt explained on the Forza 4 blog today, Porsches were previously only available through a sub-licensing deal with EA, who owns the official Porsche license. In the past, EA has been willing to hand out sub-licenses to other companies, including Turn 10, but they didn’t this time.

“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,” Greenawalt explained.

“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. 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.”

You may not be able to drive a virtual Porsche 911 or Panamera around Forza Motorsport 4‘s tracks, but you will be able to drive three RUFs, which car enthusiasts will likely recognize as an automobile manufacturer that uses unmarked Porsche bodies and chassis for their cars.

This ultimately won’t hurt the overall quality of the game, sure, but EA’s refusal to cooperate seemingly out of the blue isn’t going to win them over any fans, to say the least. And going by other recent events, I don’t think they can afford to lose very many more.

Source: Forza Blog