Xbox has quietly killed off one of its biggest franchises

Microsoft’s firing spree isn’t over yet, following reports of them firing “50%” of the workforce behind the developers of one of its biggest franchises.

Last week, Microsoft decided to fire roughly 4% of its Xbox staff. At the time, we believed that number to be close to 9,100 employees across studios such as Bethesda, Rare, ZeniMax, and King.

Well, the bad news didn’t stop there.

As initially reported by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier on BlueSky, several other studios were subject to further staff cuts, “including Call of Duty studios such as Raven.”

However, one studio took an even greater blow: “Big cuts at Forza Motorsport developer Turn 10 - nearly 50% of staff, per source.”

Turns out, things are actually even worse for Turn 10 than the initial story led us to believe.

Fred Russell, who is credited as a Content Coordinator on Forza Motorsports 5, revealed in a post on Facebook that Microsoft has “shuttered” the franchise.

“Turn 10 Studios has shuttered the Forza Motorsport space and the team is no more”, Russell stated in his post.

“A very sad day for one of the best car racing video games. I loved my time there.”

Considering Turn 10 was responsible for developing the Forza Motorsport titles, this likely means that one half of the Forza franchise is done for good.

Assumedly the other half, the Forza Horizon series developed by Playground Games, is still being worked on.

It goes without saying that all of the cuts that Microsoft has made over the past week are awful, but this one is just bizarre.

Forza is one of their biggest franchises. Every single game in the franchise has been, at worst, relatively successful, so whoever decided to shutter the studio behind them genuinely might be one of the dumbest people in recorded history.

This honestly makes me think that nobody at Microsoft is safe at this point.