Forza Motorsport's Lack Of Split-Screen Was A Creative Decision, Phil Spencer Says

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," he said.

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," he said.

Spencer said his aim is to make sure Xbox games are supported across Series S and Series X. The Series S caused some issues for Baldur's Gate 3 specifically, but Spencer said he is "not overly worried" about this situation. "But we've learned some stuff through it," he said.

The new Forza Motorsport launches on October 10 for Xbox Series X|S and PC, as well as Xbox One through cloud gaming.