Forza Motorsport developer hit by significant job losses

Forza Motorsport developer Turn10 Studios has been decimated by job losses, according to a report by technology news outlet The Verge.

The cuts are part of a widespread purge of studios owned by Microsoft Games, with up to ‘9,000’ employees thought to have lost their jobs, including the complete shutdown of Zenimax Online Studio and The Initiative, which had been lined up to create a new Perfect Dark game.

The firings are said to have affected the ‘vast majority’ of Turn10’s employees (reportedly more than 70 people), with enough employees said to have escaped the cuts to allow Forza Motorsport to continue functioning.

Turn10 Studios was founded in 2001 and has exclusively worked on the Motorsport franchise since, releasing nine titles across Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox Series X|S and Windows platforms.

Industry-wide cuts

Racing game developers have had a tough time of late, with Electronic Arts confirming in May that historic British studio Codemasters would cease developing rally games, facing a swathe of job cuts and role relocations in the process.

Sadly, the shuttering of studios isn’t solely confined to the racing game genre, with a wider trend of job losses throughout the video game industry in the last few months, with the likes of Warner Bros. Games, Crytek, Ubisoft, Activision Blizzard, Take-Two Interactive and Bungie (and many more) joining EA and Microsoft Games in trimming their labour force.

Microsoft’s most recent cuts are thought to be partially motivated by the rise of AI-assisted coding, with Microsoft’s Developer Division president Julia Liuson reportedly stating that ‘up to 30 per cent of the company’s code was now being written by AI bots’.

Although Forza Motorsport is still a going concern for the moment, the decimation of Turn10 Studios makes the prospects of a sequel slim, with the appearance this year of sister title Forza Horizon 5 (by Playground Games) on PlayStation 5 perhaps indicative of a wider shift in Microsoft’s video game strategy.

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