The official social media channels for Forza Motorsport have broken the long silence over the past five weeks to confirm that developer Turn 10 will continue to support the title over the coming months — though what’s in store beyond that remains a mystery.
It’s been more than a month since we heard about the latest round of job losses at Microsoft which essentially cut staffing at Turn 10 in half. Though the numbers vary and precise determinations are hard to make, a significant number of senior staff working on the Forza Motorsport series confirmed their departures at the time.
More recently, the most recent game’s creative director, Chris Esaki, also seemed to confirm his own exit through an update to his LinkedIn profile — where he’s now described as “Ex-Microsoft”, rather than the previous “Creative Director @ Microsoft”. That would be the biggest possible redundancy in terms of Forza Motorsport.
That’s left fans wondering what the future holds for the current title, especially with an uncharacteristic lack of communication from the developer on either its website or social channels. Today’s update provides a little comfort, at least with regards to the current title.
First, the good news: Turn 10 will continue support for Forza Motorsport as well as Forza Horizon 5 — which runs on the same ForzaTech engine as Motorsport.
That’s going to begin with the next update, named Update 21, which will carry on with a new approach introduced in Update 20 and bring back old “Featured Tours” to the game on a permanent basis.
This will allow players who missed out on the initial appearance a chance to take part and — more importantly — win the prize cars locked to the activity. This time round that’ll be the Track Toys Tour from Update 8 and starting today.
From this point on, there’ll be an additional returning Featured Tour at the start of every month and T10 has already announced that the Ringer Tour from Update 5 will be September’s event.
However, there’s no mention of any new-to-game vehicles or circuits, and it’s not clear what will happen once all of the previous Featured Tours have returned, which leads us into the bad news portion.
In addition to the absence of any new content for the current game, there’s still the question of the future for the series, and it’s notable that the social media post above refers to Forza Motorsport and Forza Horizon 5, suggesting the individual games rather than the two series. It could also be read in a way that suggests Playground Games, of the Horizon series, will be supporting FM too.
At this point in time, absent further clarification, several possibilities still exist but with the studio staffing halved, and the departure of many senior staff and department heads — including the creative director himself — it seems unlikely that there’ll be another Forza Motorsport, or at least not one from Turn 10.
Given that Microsoft Gaming boss Phil Spencer already announced “the next Forza” for 2026, we could see T10 turned into a ForzaTech support studio for Playground Games to produce Forza Horizon 6 (and Fable) based on the engine. For now though, we’ll have to wait and see.
