Yes, the fork happened because the core team wanted to tweak the cryptonight PoW algorithm. They have a habit of hard forking every 6 months, and it seems that these contentious forks resulted from a disagreement. Please watch: https://steemit.com/steemir/@brokecollegegrad/monero-hard-fork-results-in-4-cryptocurrencies

Thanks for commenting Hive account@bullsvsbears