Last week’s daylong event in San Francisco, which fell outside the drumbeat of major video-gaming trade shows, was officially held to tout games coming this spring for Xbox and Windows.

Notably, all the titles Microsoft featured will have variants available on the PC.

Among them is “Forza Motorsport 6: Apex,” a version of the auto-racing franchise developed by Microsoft-owned Turn 10 Studios. “Apex,” a slimmed down version of its Xbox cousin, will be released free to users of Windows 10 this spring.

Racing games have long been used as showpieces of the amount of visual detail developers could pack into games running on new hardware and software. “Apex” is positioned as an effort to show off the gaming potential of Windows 10.

Reported after an event and then taken down so presumably this will be confirmed once the NDA expires on the event.

As someone who was big into Forza (mainly 2 to 4 but Horizon was enough for me to 100% the achievements, even if I didn't play it nearly as much as F3/4) but has yet to see MS push the local XBOne price down to something reasonable* then I'm interested in Forza coming to PC. I've got more than enough hardware to walk all over the 768 GCN cores (@853MHz) that it was running on before so no amount of overhead is going to make it a worse experience (and I'll have a new GPU eventually so here's to enjoying Forza at 4K in the future).

Really hope this Spring demo edition is a tech test and later i the year we get a full version on offer. Maybe even see what FH2 does for the platform. It seems way too early for this to be a test before a simul-release of F7 and I'm not sure FH3 really interest me (yet to play much more than the demo of FH2).

* it's technically worse than the PS4 - being so similar that's impossible to miss - and I already have a PS4, so it must be offered for significantly less and that's just not happened where I live. Rather upgrade my PC considering the thousands of games (many I already own and can buy very cheaply) that all become better looking when I do that.

As someone who still plays Forza 4 fairly frequently and has yet to be convinced enough by either of the current-gen consoles to actually jump off my 360, I was just commenting on Twitter the other day that a Forza on PC could cement my next gaming purchase as being a decent PC. I think Forza is the only exclusive that would have tied me to either console once I finally made my much-delayed jump from last gen.

@littleg: I've got a One, but after playing Forza 5 and then Horizon 2, it'll take a lot to get me away from just buying the Horizon games.

Official trailer is out, in 4K:

I'm actually really excited by this. Would love to get a full release of a Motorsport or a Horizon with the delicious high end graphics.

According to IGN, all future Forza Motorsports will be for both PC/Xbox One:

http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/03/01/forza-motorsport-6-apex-announced-free-to-play-on-pc

Given the next Forza Motorsport will probably be in 2018 2017, there's plenty of time for that remark to be recanted or otherwise called back. Interesting development, regardless.

Guess my xbone is becoming patently useless now? Oh well.

@ripelivejam: Yeah I came to realize this when they announced Killer Instinct for PC. Now this and Quantum Break. Time to reformat it to factory settings and sell that thing off.

@Trace: This sounds a lot like how I kinda expected MS to react to not getting another 360 (leading platform for HD gaming). Look at a massive pool of PC gamers who would probably buy games made by MS if given the chance and might even do so via their store (so avoid giving anyone else a 30% cut of each sale). That is a lot of money available for games that are already being developed for the DX12 API and so just need a bit of tweaking to work better on the range of PC hardware.

Elsewhere the interviews included that MS currently track about 80 million Windows 10 gamers out there, subtract the 18 million XBOne users who may well be counted in that number as that is the OS the console runs now and we're at a 60 million install base for DX12/Win10/PC. If you multiply the active Steam users by the latest hardware survey you get 55 million Steam users running Windows 10 x64. That obviously ignores the ~100 million Steam users on previous Windows editions (including the millions of people in China all using the same pirated copy of Windows XP) but it's a good sanity-check of MS's assertion (what with new copies of Win10 installing Candy Crush by default, you have to wonder if MS might have been sneaky in counting their "40% of Win10 users are gamers" quote but it seems to check out with people at least engaged enough with PC gaming to have installed Steam too).

As a Forza fan, this really aligns well with stuff for me. It's a bit of a shame that MS didn't think they could sell those 18 million XBOne consoles without refusing the release the games they developed on their largest gaming platform (Windows) and now some people are going to feel cheated into buying a console for exclusives that they can actually play on their PC.

I hate to be a bummer, this won't have multiplayer or wheel support. http://www.virtualr.net/forza-motorsport-6-apex-officially-announced

I am totally okay with this. I loved Forza 2 on Xbox 360 back in the day and I'd love to see the Forza franchise get onto PC someday... alongside Gran Turismo, but we both know that'll probably never happen.

@waronhugs: Yep, it's a free demo (but it sounds like, going forward, Forza is also at home on PC so full games with online are coming as soon as we get a new Forza to buy).

That said, I've played countless hours of Forza and about 99% of that is online in the sense of leaderboards. Give me a club roster to drive against with some clean laps and I'm happy.

The lack of wheels sounds like an issue with the lack of drivers for the stupid unified app ecosystem/Windows Store and the interview I read made it sound like they were planning to actually work on that so by the time they're offering a Forza with a price tag, that should hopefully be sorted out. If not then they're looking to be crushed by the existing PC racing competition.

free demo? aren't demo's supposed to be free?

Ooof, then you've not been looking at all the exclusive demos of games called "betas" you have to put cash down (before reviews) to purchase as part of the game? Or buying Game X so you also purchase the beta access for Game Y?

I wish that, yes, all demos were free. That would be great. Also all games should have demos because part of them is being interactive software and sometimes that means they don't actually work right.

Also "free demo" to me sounds like a completely free thing. Whereas F2P and other language could also be a demo of a game but actually it's the "freemium" hook of a highly monetised platform experience. This sounds like they're releasing a free game that's not as big as the previously similar named game. So "free demo" feels about right as a category.

Hah. Nope.