Long-time racing gamers are likely well aware of the often-limited shelf life of licensed racing games; indeed, 2017’s
Forza Motorsport 7 hit so-called ‘End of Life’ status back in September 2021 after just four years on sale. The delisting of Forza Motorsport 7 had no impact on those who had purchased the game, but it did mean it could no longer be purchased new thanks to expiring licenses. Greenawalt confirms that Forza Motorsport’s future as a platform going forward has seen the team change the way it needs to think about licensing, “and that forced us to double down on having a very agile game.”
“A game that we can move things around, we can showcase or spotlight, and we can move things in and out,” he says.
Moving anything
out, of course, is a thorny subject, but Greenawalt states Turn 10’s “ultimate goal is to not have that happen.”
“So working and changing our licensing agreements, and how we work with licensors so that we have the ability to update them over time and not have it be so binary,” he says. “So is that a promise? It can’t be, because there are over a thousand licenses in our game. But we’ve tried to shift towards language that makes this more than just licensing, but into a bit more of a partnership where they are part of this game and they want to continue to be part of it.”
“But it’s going to take continuous tending. We had a rhythm of doing licenses and releasing, and now it needs to be a constant garden. That we’re just tending all of these [licenses] over time and keeping them alive. We don’t want to lose anything! We’re gamers too. So we want to play all that, and we want all that stuff to just grow over time.”
