Turn 10 Studios, the creator of Forza Motorsport, no longer exists as an independent studio. Weeks after Microsoft folded the team into Playground Games, Dan Greenawalt, co-founder of Turn 10 and creator of the Forza series, announced his retirement after almost 27 years at the company.
What was announced
The news came from an internal Playground Games memo seen by The Verge's Tom Warren. In it, studio head Trevor Williams told staff that Greenawalt “has decided that this is the right time for him to retire from Microsoft.” During the transition, he will stay on as an adviser to Williams and to Michel Bastien, Playground's newly appointed chief operating officer.
The Turn 10 name is gone
The memo also confirmed what the September 2026 merger announcement had left open: the combined studio is simply called Playground Games, split across two sites — Playground Games Leamington Spa, in the United Kingdom, and Playground Games Redmond, in the United States. The Turn 10 name is gone.
The merger is part of a broader restructuring of Xbox Game Studios. The resulting team is expected to focus on the Forza and Fable franchises.
How it got here
The end of Turn 10 as an independent studio was the outcome of a process lasting more than a year. In July 2025, the studio lost nearly half of its staff in a wave of Microsoft layoffs, according to Bloomberg. In December of the same year, Turn 10 confirmed that Forza Motorsport (2023) would receive no new content or regular bug fixes. The remaining team in Redmond moved to work on Forza Horizon and Fable.
What about the future of Forza Motorsport?
Microsoft has not explicitly said that Forza Motorsport is finished, and Greenawalt's retirement alone does not prove that. But the outlook is bleak for the simulation series: with no studio of its own, no creator at the helm and no new content since 2025, the franchise's future remains uncertain. The brand's most visible side remains Forza Horizon — the sixth game in the series launched in May 2026 and, as Geekiki previously reported, arrives on PlayStation 5 on January 26, 2027, alongside its first expansion.
A two-decade legacy
Greenawalt was a Microsoft employee when the original Xbox launched in 2001 with Project Gotham Racing. That experience led him to pitch a simulation-focused racing game — and a new in-house studio to build it. Turn 10 began in 2002 with just ten people. Three years later, in May 2005, the first Forza Motorsport arrived, built to take on Gran Turismo directly.
Over 27 years, Greenawalt worked on every Forza game, from the original to Forza Motorsport (2023), and helped turn the franchise into one of Xbox's pillars.
Image: Dan Greenawalt presents Forza Motorsport 3 at Microsoft's conference during E3 2009. Photo by Major Nelson, licensed under CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Sources
- GTPlanet — Forza Creator Dan Greenawalt to Retire From Microsoft After 27 Years
- Traxion — The face of Forza has retired
- Notebookcheck — What's the future of Forza Motorsport? Studio restructured, series creator departs
- Wikipédia — Turn 10 Studios
Transparency: this article was produced with the help of artificial intelligence, based on cross-checking public posts and internet sources listed above. We recommend consulting the original sources to verify the details.
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