The new Forza Motorsport game from Turn 10 Studios does not have split-screen and other features from past games. But why no split-screen? According to Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer, the decision has nothing to do with technical limitations but was instead a creative choice by the team.
"Forza Motorsport was never going to have split-screen. That's just a decision the team made based on usage,"
Spencer told Eurogamer.
Microsoft sees the data around how many people use split-screen, and it's not enough to justify the development effort to make it happen this time.
We see how many people play in split-screen and just decided to put our dev effort where people are actually playing.
Talking to IGN about the same issue, Spencer said the lack of split-screen in Forza Motorsport has nothing to do with the team at Turn 10 needing to support Xbox Series X and the less powerful Xbox Series S console. "It's just where they wanted to focus their time," Spencer said.
Turn 10 creative director Chris Esaki explained Forza Motorsport's lack of split-screen earlier this month. He said the team's "heavy investment in pushing our new graphical features and our complete overhaul of the rendering engine, unfortunately made split-screen really difficult to implement, and is also not going to be in for launch."
Some have suggested that the Series S is holding back the wider Xbox ecosystem because developers need to support two machines with different specs. Spencer told Eurogamer, "I don't see a world where we drop S."
"There are features that ship on X today that do not ship on S, even from our own games, like ray-tracing that works on X, it's not on S in certain games. So for an S customer, they spent roughly half what the X customer bought, they understand that it's not going to run the same way