Forza Horizon and Motorsport developers set to “come together as one studio” says Xbox

Xbox has announced that the two studios behind Forza Horizon and Forza Motorsport will, to paraphrase the Spice Girls, become one. That new merged team will focus on both Forza and Fable games.

The news was announced via Xbox’s news wire, where a frighteningly regular stream of layoff announcements have been posted in recent years. Entitled ‘Continuing our reset’, the sort of language to make your forehead sweaty if you saw it appear as a subject line in an intra-company email, it details Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty’s larger plan for all the studios it owns, including 268 layoffs.

That’s in addition to the 1600 layoffs announced back in July. Yikes. It’s not specified how many roles will be affected by this Playground Games and Turn 10 merger, however.  

“These two studios have been creative and franchise partners for over a decade,” says Booty, “and today’s changes will formally move their work into one team.”

It’s a strange full circle moment for the Forza franchise. The original Horizon team had to pitch their spinoff game to Turn 10 and Microsoft and convince them it sat flush within the franchise’s previously straight-faced, Gran-Turismo-like image. 15 years later, it’s all one entity.

Forza Horizon 6 has been predictably successful since its launch in May, selling over six million copies so far. We called it “the best racing game you’ll play this year” in our review. Months later that still holds true, despite the imminent brilliance of Star Wars: Galactic Racer.

Fable, meanwhile, is a more leftfield marriage of developer and genre. An RPG series originally created by Peter Molyneux’s Lionhead Studios, it’s all about the consequences of player choice on a dynamic fantasy world. Now in Playground Games’ hands, a reboot is scheduled for February 2027.

As the latest gameplay shows, it’s one of the most exciting upcoming games out there. Not just because it realises its fantasy world with such crisp precision, but because it’s also really leaning into a very British sense of humour. Distinct voices and creative risks are as rare these days as – well, as rare as a week without an announcement about layoffs on the Xbox news wire, so we’re keenly anticipating this one.

It’s not clear how this affects the Forza Motorsport series, which has been a bit quiet since the mixed reception to 2023’s, um, Forza Motorsport. Hopefully there’s room in that omni-studio for both flavours of Forza, but that remains to be seen.