- #DOES THE FORZA HORIZON 4 ULTIMATE EDITION HAVE A DISC LICENSE#
- #DOES THE FORZA HORIZON 4 ULTIMATE EDITION HAVE A DISC DOWNLOAD#
Advertisementįurther Reading Loot boxes have reached a new low with Forza 7’s “pay to earn” option FM7's Game Pass version is the "standard" one, and if you had previously bought any DLC for the game as a Game Pass user, you'll soon get a notification within Xbox's interface of a "token" that lets you own FM7 outright once it's delisted.
#DOES THE FORZA HORIZON 4 ULTIMATE EDITION HAVE A DISC LICENSE#
(To be clear, that very differentiation is one reason Game Pass's reputation has taken off compared to Sony's similar PlayStation Now service.) No other first-party Xbox series is similarly subject to license expirations and delistings, which is why the service still offers every title from Microsoft-published series like Gears of War, Halo, and Fable. FM7's delisting means it will vanish from Game Pass and leave a car-sim-sized hole, proving that Microsoft won't always have "at least one" sim racer available for people who subscribe to Game Pass for the promise of premier, first-party game access. A rare content lapse in a Game Pass eraĪrguably the bigger differentiator this time is an entirely new sales proposition for all things Xbox: the Game Pass subscription service. As a result, when FM7 is delisted on September 15, there won't be a newer Motorsport game available to purchase via Xbox Live for the first time in that storefront's existence. Instead, an ahead-of-schedule Horizon 5 appeared with a November 2021 release date. Horizon 4 arrived in 2018, and two years later, the debut of Xbox Series X/S included "real gameplay" teases of an upcoming Motorsport sequel.īut this year, during the usual June hype cycle, Forza Motorsport didn't pull up to the starting line. Thanks to that historic release tempo, a new Motorsport seemed right around the corner. That schedule also guaranteed that, when an older game was delisted, a newer version was usually there to take its place. Microsoft would publish a new Motorsport game, then a new Horizon, and repeat. Series creator Turn 10 Studios usually spends a few years between entries, a fact masked somewhat by the introduction of Forza Horizon, the series' arcade-minded, open-world jelly to Motorsport's sim-focused peanut butter. One is that the series' regular sequel cadence has come to a grinding halt. AdvertisementįM7 is a different story, however, for a few reasons.
For most of the modern gaming industry's history, four-year-old games have usually been relegated to bargain bins-especially if they receive regular sequels-so such a licensing term doesn't seem egregious.
Arguably the most prominent early example came when Nintendo began reprinting copies of its 1987 sports-action classic Punch-Out!! in 1990 without re-upping its original license deal with Mike Tyson, and it's not uncommon to see publishers either strip licenses from older games or give up on them altogether. Look closely enough at major licenses in classic video games and you'll see a similar trend. This suggests that the game's car licenses factor into the cutoff dates.
#DOES THE FORZA HORIZON 4 ULTIMATE EDITION HAVE A DISC DOWNLOAD#
Since the Xbox Live download store has been in operation, other Forza games, both in the Motorsport and Horizon camps, have been delisted at a nearly identical cadence. That date marks roughly four years past the game's 2017 launch on Xbox One consoles, and "four years" is key. Starting September 15, 2021, the sim racing game Forza Motorsport 7 will no longer be available on Xbox's digital download shops. On paper, the basic announcement may look humdrum to savvy modern-gaming fans. But the game publisher and console maker is quieter about taking older games down from its digital storefronts-and this week's latest casualty, in the form of a popular first-party game, presents problems for Xbox's recent sales pitches.
Microsoft has long boasted about the backward compatibility of its Xbox consoles, letting you play hundreds of past-gen games on newer systems like the Series X/S.