Turn 10 director Dan Greenawalt has said that Porsche will not make an appearance in Forza Motorsport 4.

The German car giant had appeared in past Forza games thanks to a sub-licensing deal with EA, who had the exclusive licence for the company. Now, EA has blocked it from appearing in FM4 in any form.

“While Forza Motorsport 4 will feature RUF, it will not include Porsche cars. As many of you know, since the beginning of the Forza franchise, the Porsche license has been available only through a sub-licensing deal with EA,” Greenawalt said in a post on the Forza website.

“In Forza 3, we were able to feature more than 35 different Porsche models by offering to collaborate with EA. For Forza 4, we were looking forward to adding even more Porsche cars, and we were especially looking forward to featuring multiple Porsche experiences in our new Autovista mode. In the end, however, EA couldn’t see their way towards collaborating again.”

He continued: “We’ve asked our contacts at EA to reconsider their position frequently and regularly over the last 18 months. We also reached out to various influential people in gaming to lobby on our behalf, and on your behalf, but that was to no avail.”

Greenawalt remained hopeful that Porsche would be in Forza again, citing its exclusive Ferrari licence as one example of how the system could potentially work in the right way.

“While we respect EA’s need to run their business as they see fit, we’ve regularly collaborated in the past and hope we can find our way back to that approach. Forza had the exclusive license for all Ferrari cars, for example, on the Xbox and PC platforms,” he said.

“But at the end of the day, we’ve always found that we just weren’t willing to block other racing games from having Ferraris outright, as we believed that this would do nothing but hurt the racing ecosystem.

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“I’m very sorry for all of this. Fans shouldn’t have to think about any of this – you should just be able to drive Porsches and Ferraris in the games you love. Porsche makes wonderful cars and I’m sorry that we won’t have them in Forza 4.”

Forza 4 launches in October for Xbox 360.