For those who don’t keep up with the state of video games as a business, the industry is in a bit of a crisis. Skyrocketing hardware prices are making the hobby less accessible, last-gen “console war” winner Sony is on a generational run when it comes to back-to-back PR disasters, and game studios have been laying people off at such a rate for the past few years that the phenomenon has its own entire Wikipedia article. As part of the latest round of cuts that happened at Microsoft’s Xbox on Tuesday, the two studios behind its flagship Forza racing franchise are merging, which pretty much means the end of the core series that started it all.
In a memo sent to Xbox employees and posted to Xbox Wire, Chief Content Officer Matt Booty announced the elimination of 268 roles as well as scope changes for several big first-party (read: in-house) game studios. Among them: “[Forza Horizon developer] Playground and [Forza Motorsport creators] Turn 10 will come together as one studio focused on the Forza and Fable franchises. These two studios have been creative and franchise partners for over a decade, and today’s changes will formally move their work into one team.”
It’s all just Playground now
When Kotaku probed further into what that’ll actually mean, Xbox said that instead of the two forming a new studio with a new name, Playground boss Trevor Williams would “continue to lead Playground Games,” implying the end of Turn 10 as an entity. And while official Microsofts that “Forza Motorsport” as a series is even more dead now than it already was
GTPlanet has a good summary on the state of “Forza Motorsport,” but the condensed version is that the rebooted game released in 2023 to lukewarm-at-best audience reception, then almost half of Turn 10 was laid off in July 2025 before a December announcement said the game would no longer get updates. Since then, what remained of T10 has been helping Playground finish and presumably maintain “Forza Horizon 6,” which came out in May.
An unfortunate, undignified, and frankly upsetting death for a studio that came out swinging 20 years ago with a biennial racing series that was gorgeous, fun, realistic enough, indeed managed to hold a candle to PlayStation’s “Gran Turismo,” and briefly even surpass it around the end of the Xbox 360 era. To remind us all of better days, here’s that FM4 intro.
