According to Fred Russell, a former content coordinator for Turn 10 Studios, the Forza Motorsport series may be done for good following the massive Microsoft layoffs that saw half of Turn 10’s employees let go. Supposedly, the team will only be used for support on the Forza Horizon games, a series that is mainly handled by Playground Games. He took to Facebook to say, “Turn 10 Studios has shuttered the Forza Motorsport space and the team is no more. A very sad day for one of the best car racing video games. I loved my time there.”
From his wording, it appears that he is not saying Turn 10 as a whole has been shutdown, but specifically the team focused on developing and supporting Forza Motorsport.
Is Forza Motorsport Really Done?
If you happen to be a massive fan of the Forza Motorsport series and don’t want to believe this news, there may be a glimmer of hope. First, the most obvious thing to point out is no official word has been given on the future of Turn 10 Studios yet. There is a possibility that the only current plans for Turn 10 is to support the next Horizon game and then after that maybe focusing on a new Motorsport. Second, while Russell is a former employee and possibly remains in contact with certain members of the team, he hasn’t worked there since 2016. Kayla Goullaud, who also worked at Turn 10 between 2018-2019 commented on his post noting her skepticism, and Chris Harding, a former Microsoft employee says the total number of layoffs from Turn 10 was 120 people, which Kayla agrees with.
While Playground Games has always been the head developer on Forza Horizon, a spin-off series that overtook the original Motorsport in popularity, we imagine that Turn 10 had aided them in some ways and vice versa when developing their games. If Microsoft doesn’t want to make anymore Motorsport games and only focus on Horizon, we could see why they would drastically cut down Turn 10 so much.
The wording on the layoffs say specifically half of the Turn 10 team was let go, so we wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the remaining employees are only going to be helping with the next Horizon entries after Playground releases Fable next year. At the Xbox Showcase in June, Phil Spencer did mention a new Forza Horizon was going to be coming next year, so the developers at Playground not working on Fable would probably need some help.
As of this writing, there is still so much that is up in the air from the fallout of the Xbox layoffs. The sad part is there is potentially a scenario where Xbox never mentions Motorsport again and lets it just fade into the background quietly. In hopes to get some confirmation one way or another, we have reached out to Xbox and will update this story if they get back to us.
