In the racing game genre, Forza Horizon is now second only to Mario Kart. In the driving game genre — which you can loosely define as racing games set in the real world — it is second to none. Its ascendancy is confirmed by the runaway success of Forza Horizon 6, which has seen explosive growth on Steam alongside the series’ traditional audience on Xbox and Game Pass, and has a PlayStation 5 version yet to come.
It’s amazing how far the series has come since 2012, when it launched as a spinoff of Xbox circuit-racer Forza Motorsport — itself chasing the tails of PlayStation’s Gran Turismo — and a humble challenger to EA’s then massively popular Need for Speed. All those games now lie in Forza Horizon’s rear-view mirror. (Though the venerable Gran Turismo isn’t to be underestimated; Sony hasn’t reported sales figures for Gran Turismo 7, but Polygon understands it has sold very well and continues to do so.)
Forza Horizon’s appeal isn’t hard to understand. It offers technically polished, accessible, entertainment-first racing in beautiful open-world settings, with a huge quantity and variety of stuff to do, and a vast but well-curated catalog of real-world cars. Developer Playground Games (now assisted by Forza Motorsport studio Turn 10) has formidable quality control, and has just achieved the rare feat of four consecutive games with a 90-plus Metacritic rating.
At this point, it’s tough to see how Forza Horizon can be challenged. But it will be, because there’s one thing the series doesn’t really do. It doesn’t innovate.
While Playground is constantly refining and adding to its formula, it has arguably only made two substantive changes to it (both very successful): the addition of complete off-road free-roam in Forza Horizon 2, and the shift to a kind of live-service-lite structure with seasonal weekly playlists introduced in Forza Horizon 4.
Familiarity breeds contempt. Forza Horizon 6 is wonderful, but it’s the definition of a known quantity, and I wonder if it would have received the same acclaim if it hadn’t been a relatively long four-and-a-half years since the last one. I had assumed Playground wasn’t fixing what wasn’t broken, but a recent interview with the studio’s former head suggests he was frustrated in his attempts to move the series and the genre forward.
Gavin Raeburn was a senior producer at Codemasters, heading up Dirt, Grid, and F1, when he left to form Playground Games in 2009. In 2022, after Playground’s acquisition by Microsoft and the release of Forza Horizon 5, Raeburn left to form yet another startup, Lighthouse Games. (Lighthouse is based just streets away from the Playground offices in Royal Leamington Spa, and a short drive from the Codemasters HQ in neighboring Southam.)
Speaking to Forbes back in April, Raeburn hinted that one reason for his departure was Xbox’s unwillingness to countenance innovation and change within Forza Horizon. “I felt I’d gone as far as I could with Horizon,” he said. “It was going to continue to be successful. It was going to be fun to work on, but I wanted to do more, and I couldn’t really do that at Xbox. I couldn’t add what I wanted to Horizon. I couldn’t change it.”
According to Forbes, Raeburn believes he has the formula for “the next generation of racing games,” which he’s putting into place at Lighthouse; he promised it will be “just as big a jump as Horizon was from Dirt 2.” The studio is funded by Chinese giant Tencent and staffed with Playground and Codemasters veterans.
It wasn’t just conservatism at Xbox holding Playground and Forza back, Raeburn told Forbes; there’s an inherent resistance to change at any studio. He even suggested that Playground has grown complacent in its success. “When you build a studio, and you build tech, you build it at a point in time,” he said. “You build a certain culture, you build the tech and know it’s fit for that purpose then, but over time it’s not: Things start to unravel, things set in stone, even a bit of complacency, perhaps.”
Raeburn didn’t share any of his big ideas with Forbes. But he appeared confident that nobody else, including his old team at Playground, has them. What’s more, he suggested to Forbes that Playground and his other competitors in racing games — he cites Ivory Tower, which makes The Crew for Ubisoft — are making “mistakes” Lighthouse will avoid. “I want them to keep making them,” he said.
Lighthouse isn’t the only ex-Playground studio hoping to take a pop at Forza Horizon’s hegemony. It isn’t even the only one in a five-mile radius. Maverick Games, founded by Forza Horizon 5 creative director Mike Brown, is in nearby Warwick. Maverick will soon unveil its own open-world driving game, despite losing Amazon as a publisher in February. The game has a focus on storytelling — a risky bet for the genre, and a hill many racing games have died on before. Elsewhere, Ivory Tower is prepping a new entry in its well-regarded series The Crew, which saw many PlayStation players through their Forza Horizon envy until last year.
But the likeliest source of a Forza Horizon killer is 10 minutes’ walk away from Playground, at Lighthouse. Raeburn once had a vision for the future of racing games and turned out to be dead right. He claims he’s done it again; I wouldn’t bet against him.
