Playground Games Co-Founder Developing AAA Forza Horizon Rival

For some time now, the Forza Horizon franchise has had the AAA open-world racing genre pretty neatly wrapped up. The Need for Speed series has been hit and miss of late and is now on hiatus, The Crew titles have been steadily improving, but still aren’t quite at Horizon’s level, and Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown is… well, Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown.

It now appears that the biggest competition on the (ahem) horizon for Microsoft’s mega-popular racer is coming from people with past experience working on Horizon itself. In 2022, Gavin Raeburn, co-founder of Horizon developer Playground Games, left the company and established a new AAA studio, Lighthouse Games.

Raeburn and Lighthouse publishing director Alex Bertie have now spoken to GamesIndustry.biz about what the nascent developer has in the works, and it sounds rather intriguing.

Raeburn confirmed that the studio is working on a new open-world racing title, designed to go head-to-head with the Horizon franchise, while doing something “that is very different and disruptive in the racing market.

He mentions the unprecedented success of the Horizon franchise and how it’s opened up the racing genre to an audience that otherwise might not have been interested in car-based games.

“That’s why we think there's room for disruption here,” he continues. “People want more experiences. They don't just want the Horizon experience, and there isn't really many places you go… There are huge areas that we think we can move into to satisfy a latent desire for different types of car games.”

Details on the game are still few and far between for now, but Raeburn does confirm it’s being built around Unreal Engine, a popular basis for games, albeit one that’s not often used for big-budget racers.

Lighthouse, meanwhile, now has 130 staff, around 45 of whom previously worked with Raeburn at Playground and before that, Codemasters. The studio has also secured investment from Chinese tech giant Tencent.

Whatever Raeburn and Lighthouse have in mind for their “disruptive” open-world racer, we’ll be keeping a close eye on its progress – and it’s not the only Horizon rival in the works to come from somebody who used to work on the franchise. Last year, we heard about the first project from Maverick Games, a new studio founded by former Forza Horizon creative director Mike Brown.

That game promises to be a “narrative-led” AAA open-world racer, and will be published by Amazon Games. With Horizon 5 still as popular as ever, especially following its jump across to the PS5, and still no sign of Horizon 6 anywhere, we’re more intrigued than ever to see what the series’ former creative minds are working on.