Forza Motorsport 5 is one of the better games available for the Xbox One, but some fans were disappointed to find out that the game had many in-game microtransactions that allowed users to pay to gain special advantages in the game. Now, Dan Greenawalt, creative director at Forza developer Turn 10, has come out in defense of the microtransations, telling Eurogamer that the microtransactions weren't intended to players to spend more money, but simply accelerate user progress in the game. 

"But honestly if you look at free-to-play games they usually have things called paywalls, where you're slowly wearing something down and the only way to get around it is to pay. That's not what we implemented in Forza 4 and that wasn't our goal in Forza 5 either. We don't have paywalls. We have acceleration, and that was based on feedback from players in Forza 4 - there's a small group of players that can't be bothered to do things and they have disposable income. They're the sim guys in a lot of cases. They don't want to do the career, and they don't value those aspects, and that's alright by me. With Forza 4 we had car tokens that range from one dollar to three dollars - the most expensive car was ten million credits in game, and it only cost three car tokens which would have been three dollars," said Greenawalt. 

Greenawalt claimed microtransactions weren't devised to earn Turn 10 more money. Their inclusion was added late in the game's development, he said. 

"I can totally see how people are perceiving it, but that wasn't our thought process - we designed the tokens last, which isn't how you'd do it if you were making a free-to-play game - you would design that economy and the token economy first, because that's how you make your revenue. That's not how we make the revenue - we sell the game, and the tokens aren't a big revenue driver. As a creative director, we were looking at it as basically giving people cheats, but if you want to put cheats in you have to pay for them, which puts a barrier in and makes it exclusive to those who want to pay for them."

The executive also said that microtransactions were included to help people get the more rare cars in game faster, as a way to make them more accessible for players: "And we have people that have already earned the car - the GTO and the F1 car - but that was about rarity. We didn't want to lock cars, we didn't want to have unicorns, we wanted it to be based on work that people put in. We're making changes."