Dan Greenawalt, who founded Turn 10 Studios and led the creation of Forza, is retiring from Microsoft after 27 years. Trevor Williams, the head of Playground Games, told staff in an internal memo that The Verge’s Tom Warren reported on 29 October. “Dan Greenawalt has decided that this is the right time for him to retire from Microsoft,” Williams wrote, Shacknews reported. “It’s hard to overstate Dan’s impact over the past 27 years.”
He won’t leave straight away. Greenawalt will first advise Michel Bastien, Playground’s new chief operating officer, before he formally leaves the company. Williams thanked him in the memo for “his leadership, his support, and his partnership.”
Five weeks earlier, Xbox folded Turn 10, which is based near Seattle, into Playground Games, the studio in Leamington Spa, England, that makes Forza Horizon. The Redmond team now works as Playground Games Redmond and helps make Forza Horizon and Fable, Pure Xbox reported. Forza Motorsport, the series Greenawalt started, hasn’t had an update since 2025, and Microsoft hasn’t said whether it will get another game.
Greenawalt started at Microsoft as a test engineer on its early racing games, including Midtown Madness, RalliSport Challenge and Project Gotham Racing, according to The Drive. He founded Turn 10 inside Microsoft in 2001, the year the original Xbox launched. The first Forza Motorsport came out on the original Xbox in 2005. He directed it and the next three games, Forza Motorsport 2 in 2007, Forza Motorsport 3 in 2009 and Forza Motorsport 4 in 2011, which took the series through the Xbox 360 years. He later moved into a wider creative director role covering the franchise.
Turn 10’s ForzaTech engine, first built for those games, has run every Forza Horizon game since the first one in 2012, and it also powers Playground’s Fable, GTPlanet noted. Greenawalt didn’t direct Horizon himself, but the first Horizon was built on the technology and car content from his Motorsport games, The Drive pointed out.
Turn 10 kept releasing Motorsport games for another decade after he stepped back from directing them. Forza Motorsport 5 launched with the Xbox One in 2013, followed by Forza Motorsport 6 in 2015, the PC-only Forza Motorsport 6: Apex in 2016 and Forza Motorsport 7 in 2017. The most recent game, a reboot simply called Forza Motorsport, came out on Xbox Series X|S and PC in 2023.
What’s left of Turn 10
So far, the 2023 reboot is Turn 10’s last Motorsport release. The Drive calls the series “now-defunct,” although Microsoft hasn’t said so. In July 2025, Microsoft cut about 9,000 jobs across the company, and Turn 10 lost close to half its staff, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reported. Creative director Chris Esaki was among those laid off. Turn 10 said in August 2025 that it would keep supporting Forza Motorsport, but by December the official Forza site said no further updates were planned, and the remaining team had moved to helping Playground finish Forza Horizon 6, GTPlanet reported. The game’s last numbered patch, Update 22 in September 2025, didn’t need a download.
Forza Horizon 6, set in Japan, launched on 19 May 2026 on Xbox Series X|S and PC and holds a Metacritic score of 91. It passed 270,000 concurrent players on Steam at launch, against a peak of about 80,000 for Forza Horizon 5, Windows Central reported. Premium Edition owners got five days of early access before that, during which the game passed 170,000 concurrent Steam players. Asha Sharma, the chief executive of Microsoft Gaming, called it the biggest early access launch in the series’ history.
The merger followed on 22 September. In a memo published on Xbox Wire, Xbox content chief Matt Booty said Turn 10 and Playground would become one studio “focused on the Forza and Fable franchises,” and described the two teams as “creative and franchise partners for over a decade.” The same memo, part of what Booty called the “XBOX reset,” cut 268 jobs across Halo Studios, other first-party teams and Xbox Game Studios’ central management. Microsoft said it was about three-quarters of the way through the restructuring it had announced earlier in the year.
Xbox also changed its leadership this year. Phil Spencer, who joined Microsoft as an intern in 1988 and ran its gaming business for 12 years, retired in February, and Xbox president Sarah Bond announced she was leaving on the same day. Sharma, who joined Microsoft in 2024 after working as chief operating officer at Instacart and was most recently president of its CoreAI product group, replaced Spencer. Booty was promoted to chief content officer in the same shake-up, Game Informer reported.
Williams’s memo doesn’t say what Greenawalt plans to do after Microsoft, only that he will advise Playground “while he transitions to his next phase,” The Drive reported.
