Big changes are afoot at Microsoft, as the company announced a massive reorganization of its Xbox gaming division. While Activision and Bethesda will expand their remit, adding several studios to their portfolio, Forza series developers Playground and Turn 10 won’t be included in the consolidation. Instead, the two developers are joining forces, merging into one developer after years of tag-teaming on games like Forza Horizon and Fable.
“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,” Xbox chief creative officer Matt Booty wrote in a letter to employees. What the letter doesn’t precisely mention is if there’ll be layoffs at these studios, but we do know that 268 positions at Xbox are being made redundant as part of a previously announced second wave of job cuts. Mergers typically see several roles overlap, so it won’t be too surprising to see people let go from both studios as they start the process of becoming a single team.
Playground Games has a storied career, having developed the first Forza Horizon game, released in 2012. Since then, the studio has developed each entry in the franchise, which slowly overtook the main Forza Motorsport series to become one of Xbox’s tentpole franchises. Forza Horizon 6 was released earlier this year to positive reviews, and next year will bring a new chapter in the Fable series. Turn 10 Studios is an even older developer, having been established in 2001 to develop racing games for Microsoft Game Studios.
Working solely on the Forza Motorsport series–which offered a higher degree of sim-racing realism compared to Playground’s arcade-inspired Forza Horizon games–the studio developed eight games in the series. Forza Motorsport launched in 2023 and was envisioned as a new live-service era for the racing game series, but it never really took off. Following massive layoffs in July 2025, Turn 10 Studios announced that it was ending development of new content for Forza Motorsport and began working as a support studio for Playground.
Former Forza Motorsport content coordinator Fred Russell didn’t mince his words following those layoffs, saying the team was “no more” and that the studio had been effectively shuttered.