How Forza Motorsport Evolved Into a 'Racing Platform for the Future'

2019 was some year. Baby Yoda. The end of Avengers and Game of Thrones. Two separate Fyre Festival documentaries. The first documented case of COVID-19. Suffice to say, there was… plenty going on. In fact, just about all we didn’t get in 2019 was a new instalment of the Forza Motorsport series.

We were due for it, so to speak. Since the arrival of the original in 2005, a new Forza Motorsport had dependably arrived every two years – across three generations of Xbox console hardware – for over a decade. But there would be no Forza Motorsport in 2019, despite the fact it had been two years since the launch of 2017’s Forza Motorsport 7. There’d be no Forza Motorsport in 2020, 2021, or 2022 either.

Building the next evolution of the Forza Motorsport series was going to take time, because the next evolution of the Forza Motorsport series had to be more than just a product. It was going to be a platform.

“We supported Forza Motorsport 7 more than we had any of the previous Motorsports,” explains Forza Racing Franchise Creative Director Dan Greenawalt. “So there were a lot of updates, there were changes – both free and paid. We really supported that game. And you could see the trend from Horizon 4 and into Horizon 5, and Horizon 3 even, where there’s just more supporting of our games going on.”

“We made some pretty fundamental changes in Forza Motorsport 7. Some based on fan feedback and reaction, and some based on things we wanted to do. But looking at Forza all up, we believed there was a new chapter; there was a time to turn the page.”

Looking at Forza all up, we believed there was a new chapter; there was a time to turn the page.

According to Greenawalt, it was time to embrace what made the Motorsport and Horizon pillars of Forza special in their own separate ways. The answer was to celebrate Forza Motorsport’s focus on skill and competition by crafting it into a competitive “racing platform for the future” that can evolve with its audience.

It’s important to note that, as far as Turn 10 is concerned, Forza Motorsport’s growth into a platform means taking the traditional Forza Motorsport formula and using it as the foundation for a growing world of racing – not turning the long-running racing sim into a typical live-service game. Don’t expect a limited set of content and salvoes of battle pass mumbo jumbo to follow here.

“Our approach right now is not to make a games-as-a-service,” stresses Greenawalt. “This is a massive game, and it’s launching for a $70 price, and there is a premium add-on. This is a massive AAA launch, so it’s not actually becoming a, ‘Hey, launch small and build over time.’ It’s not a service game. This is a AAA game.”

“The thing is it’s being supported with a backend that is more connected than ever, and gamers are more connected now. So we’re able to basically do both. We can have a massive AAA launch, and then we can build a platform over time.”

Building that platform means a constant supply of new content, including cars and circuits. The Forza Motorsport series has traditionally benefited from a strong and steady post-release supply of both over the years, but this new approach will see content injected into the game in a more meaningful way. That is, it’ll be scattered throughout the game as if it was always there.

“So when all of this new content comes into the game, it’s not just, ‘Oh, there’s just a bunch of cars and we don’t know what to do with ’em; have fun with them,’ [which is] kind of how we’ve released them in the past,” Forza Motorsport Creative Director Chris Esaki concedes. “Like, new cars are cool; go into free play, go into multiplayer, have fun with them, right?”

We have the opportunity now, with this more agile technology foundation that we have, to put a car into the game or put a track into the game and quickly put that across every surface area in the experience.

“We have the opportunity now, with this more agile technology foundation that we have, to put a car into the game or put a track into the game and quickly put that across every surface area in the experience. So a car comes into the game and now it’s actually where it would be appropriate. It’s in a new career mode event that wasn’t there before, on day one. Or a whole new event that didn’t exist before at all. So the same thing with tracks, and it just starts to shift and evolve this content so it always feels fresh every time there’s new content in the game.

“If you’ve played it on day one, it’s going to be different 30 days later, or 60 days later. A year from now it probably looks nothing like day one content. And so it just has this feeling of freshness all across the surface area of the game.”

As Esaki points out, previous Forza Motorsports games didn’t change in this way as new content arrived; in fact, according to Esaki, in the previous era of Motorsport there would have been no real technical way that it could have been achieved other than to “super brute force it.” Simply put, the games just weren’t set up to accommodate such changes.

But the next Forza Motorsport is.

“In November, with our first big update, Yas Marina is going to be coming into the game,” reveals Greenawalt. “It’s going to come in just as Chris described. Free, and it’s going to come into career seamlessly; if you started playing the day after it came in, you’d never even know it was never there.”

“The game is just going to shift over time very naturally. It’ll come into multiplayer, single player – all over the place – and then we’re going to add more tracks over time.”

In November, with our first big update, Yas Marina is going to be coming into the game.

The team confirms another unrevealed track is due in December, and reiterated that the Nurburgring Nordschleife is still coming into the game in “spring”, but “that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

“We certainly don’t want to split the community up, especially multiplayer,” says Esaki. “So all of the tracks right now for the foreseeable future, they’re all coming to the game for free. So that’s going to be enjoyed by everyone.”

There’s another huge reason for Forza Motorsport’s platform-first approach, and that’s player investment.

“I look at some other experiences that are out there, and people have so much invested in an experience,” says Esaki. “It’s not just hundreds of hours, it’s thousands of hours that they’re playing League of Legends, or World of Warcraft, or some other experience that they’ve just spent their lives in. And that’s how players have played Forza forever. They’ve invested thousands of hours in the game, but it’s been over all the different generations.”

That’s how players have played Forza forever. They’ve invested thousands of hours in the game, but it’s been over all the different generations.

Esaki believes that knowing the focus is not just going to shift over to another bespoke Forza Motorsport game in a few years is good for players.

“That all of that investment will stay with you is a powerful feeling,” he says. “It’s just this feeling that this is the place that I’ve invested time in, and I feel really good about it and it values that time that I’ve spent in it and it grows with me. So I think that’s a very different feeling for this Motorsport.”

For Greenawalt, the core element that makes Forza Motorsport the right experience to evolve into a platform is the nature of how skill and competition are at the heart of it.

“Once you’ve developed a skill gap, you don’t actually want to trade it in,” he says. “And that’s why you look at games like Dota, League of Legends, Counterstrike; these are the games that go more towards being a platform. Again, I’m not talking about a service; I’m really talking about being more of a platform, and it comes out of that skill.”

“That’s what pushed us down this route. It wasn’t, ‘Hey, we want to build a platform and therefore let’s make it skill-based.’ It was, ‘No, Motorsport in its heart is skill and competition; we should make that a platform.”

License to Drive

Long-time racing gamers are likely well aware of the often-limited shelf life of licensed racing games; indeed, 2017’s Forza Motorsport 7 hit so-called ‘End of Life’ status back in September 2021 after just four years on sale. The delisting of Forza Motorsport 7 had no impact on those who had purchased the game, but it did mean it could no longer be purchased new thanks to expiring licenses. Greenawalt confirms that Forza Motorsport’s future as a platform going forward has seen the team change the way it needs to think about licensing, “and that forced us to double down on having a very agile game.”

“A game that we can move things around, we can showcase or spotlight, and we can move things in and out,” he says.

Moving anything out, of course, is a thorny subject, but Greenawalt states Turn 10’s “ultimate goal is to not have that happen.”

“So working and changing our licensing agreements, and how we work with licensors so that we have the ability to update them over time and not have it be so binary,” he says. “So is that a promise? It can’t be, because there are over a thousand licenses in our game. But we’ve tried to shift towards language that makes this more than just licensing, but into a bit more of a partnership where they are part of this game and they want to continue to be part of it.”

“But it’s going to take continuous tending. We had a rhythm of doing licenses and releasing, and now it needs to be a constant garden. That we’re just tending all of these [licenses] over time and keeping them alive. We don’t want to lose anything! We’re gamers too. So we want to play all that, and we want all that stuff to just grow over time.”

For his part, Greenawalt – who’s been involved with steering the series since its inception – remains visibly enthusiastic about the exciting changes he’s witnessed in the racing genre after nearly two decades of Forza.

“My old boss left Microsoft a couple years ago and when he did, he was rifling through his drawers and he found our original pitch for Forza Motorsport, and he took a photo of the first two pages and sent it over to me in a text,” he begins. “And it’s horrible. It’s so bad. It’s so poorly written, even. Oh my god. And as I read it, I was horrified to see my own turn of phrase. It was so clearly written by me.”

Greenawalt lightheartedly admits it was slightly embarrassing.

“So I would say the first thing that’s changed the most is our level of professionalism and excellence in our jobs!” he laughs. “The team has gotten smarter, and I would say when you look at Forza Tech and what we’re delivering with this incredible graphical engine that’s now powering Motorsport, Horizon – as well as working on Fable – that has allowed us to draw in a level of talent that is not about racing or about RPGs; it’s just about great game making. I mean, truly world-class talent.”

Greenawalt believes the strength of the team has essentially upped everybody’s game.

“The team’s much bigger and it’s much more skilled, and I wouldn’t hire myself,” he grins. “I’ve lived to that position where I look back at my skills when I was in my twenties and I’m, like, ‘Nope; hard pass. You don’t get a job.’”

Beyond that, however, is the fact that racing games like Forza Motorsport no longer draw inspiration strictly from what’s happening on real-world race tracks.

“This has been the single largest shift, and I think it’s the hardest one for people to understand,” says Greenawalt. “We used to build a game that was a shadow of the real world. That is, in the real world, there’s racing – and then you can also kind of do it in a game. It’s gamified racing. What’s changed for the manufacturers and how they deal with us, what’s changed for the community, and what’s changed in racing is that we’re no longer a shadow of the real world. We’re a different world.”

What’s changed… is that we’re no longer a shadow of the real world. We’re a different world. 

“We’re a world where community is built, where people have friends. It’s integral. Community is in there. More than anything, the community has flipped it over to now we’re a real boy; we’re no longer the puppet. And I think that’s great. I think that also inspires the team too, that they’re changing car culture.”

Luke is a Senior Editor on the IGN reviews team. You can chat to him on Twitter @MrLukeReilly.