Turn 10 Folded Into Playground, and Now Dan Greenawalt Is Gone. The Forza Era That Raised a Generation of Gearheads Is Over

A lot of people who now own a real tuned car learned what a camber gauge does in Forza Motorsport. They painted their first livery there, bought their first engine swap there and found out the hard way that a 911 will spin if you lift mid-corner. This fall, the studio that made that series stopped existing as its own team, and the man who built it walked out the door.

On Sept. 22, Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty announced in a memo on Xbox Wire that Playground Games and Turn 10 Studios would "come together as one studio focused on the Forza and Fable franchises," Kotaku reported. Then on Oct. 29, The Drive, citing a staff memo first seen by The Verge, reported that Dan Greenawalt, who founded Turn 10 and directed the first four Forza Motorsport games, is leaving Microsoft after 27 years.

The merger

Booty's memo came alongside another round of layoffs. Jalopnik reported that the memo eliminated 268 roles and changed the scope of several first-party studios. Kotaku described it as the next stage of a bigger Xbox reset that began with 1,600 layoffs and major restructuring in July.

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These two studios have been creative and franchise partners for over a decade, and today's changes will formally move their work into one team.

When Kotaku asked how the merger would actually work, Xbox said there would be no new studio name and that Playground co-founder Trevor Williams would continue to lead Playground Games. Kotaku read that as Turn 10 being fully absorbed. Jalopnik went further and called it the end of Forza Motorsport as a series, noting that the 2023 reboot got a lukewarm reception, that almost half of Turn 10 was laid off in July 2025, and that a December announcement said the game would no longer receive updates. Since then, Jalopnik reported, what was left of Turn 10 had been helping Playground finish and support Forza Horizon 6, which came out in May.

The man behind it

Greenawalt's resume is basically the history of console car culture. The Drive reported that he started at Microsoft as a test engineer on Xbox launch-era racing games, Midtown Madness, RalliSport Challenge and Project Gotham Racing, before founding Turn 10 and leading the creation of Forza. He directed the first four Motorsport games, the era most fans consider the series' peak, before moving into a broader creative director role.

Williams, the Playground boss, put it plainly in his memo to staff, as quoted by The Drive from The Verge's reporting. "It's hard to overstate Dan's impact over the past 27 years," Williams wrote, pointing to everything from shipping Project Gotham Racing in 2001 to founding Turn 10 "and appearing so many times on our E3 stage, usually making a dramatic entrance with a supercar in tow." Williams said Greenawalt would stay on as an advisor to Playground for a while "while he transitions to his next phase."

Those stage entrances were part of the brand. Greenawalt rolled out each new Forza at E3 with the cover car beside him, including Forza Motorsport 7 in 2017. It was car show theater on a video game stage, and it worked.

What Forza actually did for car culture

The Drive's Adam Ismail made the case well: Forza let players do what Gran Turismo would not at the time, which was crash cars, swap engines, fit aftermarket body parts and paint liveries, then share those creations online. That last part is the one that mattered most to the scene. The livery and tune sharing tools turned Forza into a giant online car club years before Instagram did, and a generation of real-world builders got their first taste of fitment, aero and paint there.

It also built the foundation Horizon stands on. The Drive pointed out that Playground's first Forza Horizon in 2012 leaned on the technical base and huge car library from Greenawalt's Motorsport games. Horizon has become the bigger franchise, but it was built on Turn 10's work. Greenawalt, Ismail noted, often talked about wanting to turn gamers into car enthusiasts and car enthusiasts into gamers.

What is left

Forza is not going anywhere. Forza Horizon 6, set in Japan, is the series' flagship now, and Playground has built it around the culture side of the hobby, with three permanent car meet locations, including one in Tokyo inspired by the real Daikoku meet, according to Forza.net. That is a good game for people who love the meet scene.

What is gone is the track-first, sim-leaning Forza that made a whole console generation care about tire temperatures and gear ratios. Sim racers still have plenty of options on PC, and Gran Turismo carries on. But for a lot of people who first learned to tune a car with a controller in their hands, the end of Turn 10 and the exit of its founder within five weeks of each other feels like the end of a chapter. The studio that started it all is now a line in someone else's org chart, and the guy who used to drive the cover car onstage is moving on.