If This Is The End Of Forza Motorsport, We Should All Be Angry

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced it would be cutting around 9,100 jobs across its business.

It’s emerged that the vast majority of those have been within its Xbox gaming division, leading to the closure of The Initiative and ZeniMax Online Studios. That’s despite committing around $80 billion (approx. £58bn) in developing AI technology, and posting $25.8 billion of net income in Q1 2025.

Beyond those two studios, it seems pretty much every studio under Microsoft’s vast umbrella has been hit. Close to home for those of us with a love for racing games, that includes Forza Motorsport developer Turn 10.

Neither Microsoft nor Turn 10 has officially commented, but reports have suggested as many as 70 layoffs in the team – around 50 per cent of its workforce. Enough have been left to ‘keep the game up and running’, but it’s thrown the future of Forza Motorsport as a series into doubt. No matter how you want to frame it, that’s a bad thing for us all.

There’s no arguing the eighth entry into the Forza Motorsport is far from Turn 10’s best work. It suffered a rocky launch, was widely accused of missing the mark in a number of ways – from wonky-looking car models, to a misguided car upgrade system, and a FOMO-driven career mode. We even ranked it as the second-worst Forza of all time, so we can’t hide under a rock and say we haven’t been one to pile in on the criticism.

Unsurprisingly, that’s led to some fairly bleak numbers. Microsoft doesn’t share player counts, but we can learn something from the Steam numbers. As we’re writing this, it’s peaked at 1,290 players in a 24-hour period with an all-time peak of 4,703 almost two years ago.

Compare that with Forza Horizon 5 – which draws many platform parallels with Motorsport, having released day one on Microsoft’s Game Pass and Steam – with a 22,953 24-hour peak, and an all-time best of 81,096 at once, almost four years ago.

Sure, two different games, and Horizon no doubt has a wider mainstream appeal and is the definitive title of its genre. Sim racers are more widely catered on PC with iRacing, Assetto Corsa, Le Mans Ultimate… just to name a few. Then, of course, there’s Gran Turismo 7 to pull players seeking that ‘simcade’ fix to PlayStation.

Even with all that considered, though, a near twenty-fold player difference compared with a title the series itself lent a name to can only deem Motorsport as a failure.

This isn’t to say a bad game should be rewarded. But Forza Motorsport’s fortunes have turned in recent months. Content has been coming thick and fast, many of the games’ big drawbacks – poor AI, the upgrade system, and, most recently, a pivot away from limited-time events – have made it a genuinely compelling game. Only for the rug to be pulled from right under the studio.

Beyond FM8, though, the official demise of Forza Motorsport would prove a sad day for the genre. It may not have created it – you can pin that on Gran Turismo releasing some eight years before the original Forza Motorsport – but there’s no arguing it gave the genre a serious boost. Its 360-era games are widely considered to be some of the best on the console, with Forza Motorsport 4 surely within a fair shout for the greatest racing game of all time, perhaps only bested by Gran Turismo 4 and Need For Speed: Most Wanted.

Innovations like its exceptional livery editor, an easy-access online multiplayer, and the showroom-like Forzavista (originally Autovista) mode are things other games have aimed to replicate, leaving a lasting impact.

Relegating Turn 10 to a small support studio to support Horizon may ‘enhance efficiency’, as a Microsoft statement proclaimed when responding to the company-wide layoffs, but no doubt at the cost of innovation.

Speaking as a lifelong, dedicated sim racer myself, having such a large company backing our niche genre always legitimised it in the wider gaming space. To lose that feels like a large kick to our small community. Fewer games pushing the genre and giving players choices are only ever a bad thing, no matter how well-received or not they are.

If this is the end of Forza Motorsport, let me be the first to say thank you, Turn 10, for some of my greatest memories with a controller in hand. And I really hope this isn’t goodbye.