Microsoft’s year-long reorganization of Xbox has arrived at the Forza franchise. In an internal memo published on Xbox Wire today, Xbox’s Matt Booty announced that Turn 10 Studios and Playground Games will be combined into a single studio, “focused on the Forza and Fable franchises”.
On paper it’s a tidy bit of corporate housekeeping. In practice, it looks a lot like the end of Forza Motorsport as a standalone series.
What Was Announced
The merger is one line in a much longer memo covering the latest phase of what Booty calls the “XBOX reset”.
The headline item is another round of job losses, with 268 roles eliminated across Halo Studios, other first-party teams, and Xbox Game Studios’ central management functions. Microsoft says that, counting the studio divestitures completed since July, it is now roughly three-quarters of the way through the restructuring it announced earlier this year.
The rest of the memo reshuffles the remaining studios into fewer groups. Activision picks up World’s Edge and Rare, and will build the next Halo game with a new team kept separate from Call of Duty. Bethesda takes on Obsidian. King absorbs Microsoft Casual Games. And Playground and Turn 10 “will come together as one studio”.
Booty’s justification is that the two teams “have been creative and franchise partners for over a decade”, which is true. Turn 10’s ForzaTech engine has underpinned every Horizon game since the series began in 2012, and it also powers Playground’s Fable. Formally putting both teams under one roof is an acknowledgement of how the work has actually been divided for years.
Importantly, though, there is no mention of which studio’s name survives, whether the combined team will operate under a new identity, or who will lead it. Nor does it say anything about a future Forza Motorsport title.
The Long Goodbye for Forza Motorsport
If you’ve been following Turn 10’s story over the past 15 months, none of this will come as a shock.
The studio lost close to half of its staff in Microsoft’s July 2025 layoffs, including Forza Motorsport creative director Chris Esaki. A month later, Turn 10 said it would “continue to support” the 2023 reboot, which in reality meant very little. September’s “Update 22” didn’t even require a download.
Then, in December, the official Forza site confirmed there were no further updates planned for the game at all, and that the team was shifting its focus to helping Playground finish Forza Horizon 6.
Today’s announcement completes that arc. Turn 10 as an independent entity, the developer that has shipped every Forza Motorsport since the original in 2005, no longer exists.
To be clear, Microsoft has not said Forza Motorsport is cancelled, and the phrase “the Forza and Fable franchises” is deliberately broad enough to include it. But it’s hard to read this as anything other than a consolidation around Forza Horizon.
Horizon Apparently Carries the Name
The contrast with Forza Horizon 6 could not be much starker.
Playground’s Japan-set entry launched on May 19 and passed six million players within its first week across Xbox, PC and Game Pass, tripling Forza Horizon 5’s peak concurrent player count on Steam in the process. We thought it was excellent, and a PlayStation 5 version is still to come later this year, which should push those numbers higher again.
Horizon has been the commercially dominant half of the Forza name for a long time now. Forza Horizon 5 went past 40 million players in its lifetime, while the 2023 Forza Motorsport never came close to that kind of audience and spent its last year in maintenance mode. If Microsoft is choosing which of its two racing pillars to build around, the choice was made for it.
That leaves Motorsport’s future looking more like an occasional mode or spin-off than a series in its own right. Whether the combined studio ever revisits circuit racing, and in what form, is anyone’s guess, but a full-scale Forza Motorsport 9 (or whatever it might be called) in the near future seems very unlikely with the resources now available.
The Human Cost
It’s worth remembering that behind every line of this memo are people whose jobs have just been eliminated or thrown into uncertainty. The 268 roles cut today are on top of the thousands Microsoft has already shed since 2023.
The developers at Turn 10 built some of the best console racing games of the Xbox 360 era, and the ones who remain have spent the past year keeping a game alive with almost no resources while helping ship a hit for another studio. Whatever the combined team is eventually called, that work deserves recognition.
What Comes Next?
Microsoft will hold an all-Xbox town hall on October 6, which is the most likely venue for any further detail on the new studio’s name, leadership and roadmap.
See more articles on Microsoft, Playground Games, and Turn 10.
