Forza microtransactions not a Microsoft demand

Forza 5 has received a ton of negative backlash against their microtransactions. Enough for Turn 10 to commit to trying to fix the Forza economy. However, we should be keeping the blame on Turn 10 and not pointing at Microsoft, at least according to Dan Greenawalt.

Greenawalt, Creative Director at Turn 10, explained to Eurogamer that Microsoft aren’t the evil overlords depicted:

Honestly I think, unfortunately, people attribute too much communication to this organisation. The truth is, at Turn 10 while I’m a Microsoft employee, we’re off-site and we have our own culture and work our product to have our own culture. We have our own process and all of that. For the most part, Microsoft sees it as we’re doing a good thing so keep it up, and so we’re left alone.

Okay, so the microtransactions were their own idea, building upon similar mechanisms in Forza 4, not based on evil phone calls or emails from the higher ups at Microsoft. Or were they maybe left alone because they were already doing what MS wanted? So, were they wrong to add them into Forza 5?

This is happening more and more in games, and I understand gamers being resistant, especially if they feel like they’re being short-sheeted. I think people are looking out for being short-sheeted, and they’re seeing conspiracy where there isn’t one. And that’s common in today’s age. We were definitely not mandated to include these – we were experimenting in Forza 4, we experimented a bit in Horizon and now we’re further experimenting in Forza 5. But we experiment a lot of things – and when we get them wrong we try to fix them.

Ah, I see, so it was all just an experiment gone wrong. Good to know. The reality is, gamers don’t mind paying for games, they often don’t even mind paying for DLCs if they offer enough content. But microtransactions and the image of game companies shipping incomplete games and then making us pay for the missing bits – now that’s just unacceptable.

Last Updated: December 13, 2013