Xbox Boss Says Forza Motorsport Isn’t Dead Despite ‘Scaling Back’ At Turn 10 Studios
Back in the summer, Xbox developer Turn 10 suffered mass layoffs as part of a huge restructure at Microsoft – and that led to the team promptly halting major updates for Forza Motorsport. Since then, the studio has been confirmed as a support developer on the upcoming Forza Horizon 6 – but in a new interview with Famtisu, Xbox boss Phil Spencer insists that the FM IP isn’t dead.
When asked about the future of Halo and Forza Motorsport, Phil confirmed that both of these IP are still in Xbox’s plans. Of course, we now know that Halo: Campaign Evolved is the next Halo game – and while nothing has been confirmed in regards to the future of Forza Motorsport, the Xbox boss noted that Turn 10 has simply “shifted focus” for now.
Here’s Phil’s full comment on Forza, via rough online translation from Japanese:
“Regarding Forza Motorsport, we sometimes need to shift our focus to games that are released sooner. We understand the reaction many people had when we scaled back Turn10 Studios. We have a large number of games we want to support carefully, and sometimes we give development teams a little more time to avoid putting them under strain. Our current structure allows us this flexibility.”
It sounds as though Turn 10 is all hands on deck with Forza Horizon 6 for now then; supporting main developer Playground Games with its 2026 racer. This makes sense, given that the FH series is one of Xbox’s most successful properties these days, as recently evidenced by fantastic sales for Forza Horizon 5 on PS5.
Our main question now relates to the sort of Forza Motorsport game that Turn 10 could realistically produce in future, if the studio has indeed lost around 50% of its staff as was reported earlier in the year. Time will tell on that one – but we remain sceptical that FM will return anytime soon, at least in the way we’ve always known. Having said that, we hope that Microsoft and Turn 10 Studios can figure things out for the series’ future.
