To the Turn 10 Studios team,
My GamerTag is Tobyzioso, and I am writing to you as a long-time Forza Motorsport player who has been part of this franchise since Forza Motorsport 2.
I understand that Forza Motorsport has reached the end of its active development cycle, and I want to begin by saying that I respect that decision. Game development is complex, demanding, and often shaped by factors outside a studio’s control. This letter is not a request for new content, new features, or additional financial investment.
I am writing because I genuinely believe the game still has the potential to shine, particularly in one of its greatest strengths: online multiplayer racing.
For many players, myself included, the long-term appeal of Forza Motorsport lies in competitive online races. The cars, physics, and tracks create a strong foundation, but it is the quality of multiplayer racing that ultimately determines whether players remain engaged over time.
At present, one of the main challenges in online racing is not related to content or driving feel, but to on-track behavior. When mechanical damage is limited and safety or cleanliness ratings are not consistently reflected in access to popular multiplayer categories, races can sometimes lack meaningful consequences. Over time, this tends to discourage players who value clean, respectful, and simulation-oriented racing.
I would like to respectfully suggest a small shift in focus for competitive online racing, using systems that already exist within the game:
Enable mechanical damage permanently in competitive multiplayer events.
Restrict access to the most popular and serious categories (such as Touring Cars and GT classes) to drivers with a high safety or cleanliness rating (A or S).
These adjustments would not require new tools, new content, or additional investment, yet they could have a positive impact on race quality, player behavior, and long-term engagement.
If it were possible to consider a final update focused purely on strengthening online multiplayer, I would like to share three additional ideas that could further enhance the experience:
Since all players already have skill and safety ratings, making these ratings visible to other drivers during a race—at least in a simplified form—could add valuable context. Knowing whether you are racing against a consistently clean driver or a more aggressive one allows players to adapt their approach and make safer, more informed decisions.
Introducing a global or seasonal leaderboard based on multiplayer race results could motivate players to improve, reward consistency and clean driving, and encourage healthy competition within the community.
Reintroducing a spectator mode for online multiplayer races could also add depth to the experience. In Forza Motorsport 7, this feature allowed players to step back from racing while still enjoying the sport, watching races as a broadcast. It added immersion and a sense of motorsport culture that many players still appreciate.
Games that emphasize consequence, visibility, and recognition naturally foster stronger communities. When clean driving is visible and rewarded, the multiplayer experience becomes more engaging—both mechanically and emotionally—and races become more meaningful and memorable.
I am not writing to ask for change, but to share a perspective shaped by many years of passion for this series. Forza Motorsport has always occupied a unique space between accessibility and simulation, and with a focused approach to online racing, I believe it can continue to represent that balance at its best.
Thank you sincerely for your time, for the work you have done over the years, and for creating a franchise that has meant so much to so many players.
With respect,
Tobyzioso
Great post, but you wrote the answer to this request at the beginning of your statement. Active development is indeed over, the people who used to do this type of work no longer work there, the game is literally running on autopilot.
Sadly Turn10 Studios is now a supporting studio for Playground Games so in other words Turn10 Studios are no more R.I.P Turn10 Studios R.I.P 
I’m confident this would alienate the vast majority of what little remains of the player population.
This would give unsafe drivers even more power to instantly end more people’s races.
I’m confident this would also result in less-populated lobbies.
Restricting access to higher starting positions might work better - for example: those with low safety ratings cannot start in the top/front half of the grid, no matter how fast their qualifying lap times might be - which would give them the chance to build their safety rating up, and it would keep lobbies more populated.
Yes, and I’ve long believed that making it more rewarding to “do the right thing” would work better than enforcing damage & tight restrictions.
This game does not teach or incentivize sportsmanship & skill at all, which is probably why they’re so rare.
1- “I’m confident this would alienate the vast majority of what little remains of the player population. This would give unsafe drivers even more power to instantly end more people’s races.”
2- I’m confident this would also result in less-populated lobbies. Restricting access to higher starting positions might work better - for example: those with low safety ratings cannot start in the top/front half of the grid, no matter how fast their qualifying lap times might be - which would give them the chance to build their safety rating up, and it would keep lobbies more populated.
3- Yes, and I’ve long believed that making it more rewarding to “do the right thing” would work better than enforcing damage & tight restrictions. This game does not teach or incentivize sportsmanship & skill at all, which is probably why they’re so rare
.
After reading your message, I understand your points of view, but I don’t fully agree with them. Let me explain.
On point 1, I understand your concern that having permanent damage enabled would give more tools to dirty players, but that’s precisely why I would apply safety-rating restrictions to the most popular race categories. If people start to see that their actions have real consequences—such as NOT being able to play in the most popular categories—they will be more careful, assuming they actually want to keep racing in those categories.
On point 2, honestly, having categories with fewer cars on track doesn’t worry me at all. I’m absolutely sure that those of us who are looking for real competition would rather race against 10 clean drivers we can genuinely compete with than join a 24-car lobby where, in the first corner, the drivers at the back ruin the race for 20 out of the 24 racers.
And on point 3, nothing to add—on that one, I completely agree with you.
I think most of the audience would be more likely to simply quit and go play something else if this game was so restrictive.
If players start to see that their actions have real rewards, I think they’d feel more motivated to chase incentives.
I’d quickly lose interest if I was always racing against the same 10 players when most other players could not get past such tight entry restrictions.
I know it’s a pointless hypothetical anyway since the company behind the game has said they’re done with it.
I only chime in on the off chance that some current or future game designer(s) might come across this and see how the implementation of multiplayer really makes or breaks a game’s online population/community.
I respect your point of view Operator1, but honestly, I just can’t share it. On Xbox, there isn’t a single racing game that really aims for serious, genuine competition. Forza Motorsport sold us the idea that it would be like that during its development, and it actually has the tools needed to achieve that goal—they’re just not using them.
Rewards should always be tied to clean racing. I don’t care if someone is faster or slower; all that matters to me is racing fairly. It’s extremely frustrating that in 8 or 9 out of 10 races, I end up spinning out before turn 2 because other players don’t care about running me off the track, bumping my rear, or doing any dirty move just to gain a position.
In fact, I’ve been very disappointed with this aspect since the start of the game, and I’m increasingly considering selling my Xbox Series X to get a decent PC that would allow me to play a serious racing game, like iRacing.
I haven’t decided to do it yet because of how much I care about this franchise, but if things don’t change over the course of this year, I will, and I’m not the only one—many others would do the same. If the focus doesn’t change, this game is destined to fade away.
There are already plenty of games like this where you can race with people, with no rules and do whatever you want. But serious racing games on Xbox don’t exist, and that’s what could make Forza Motorsport unique, bringing back players who have already left for this reason, as well as attracting new players looking for a competitive, serious experience that they can’t find anywhere else on this platform.
All good. No hard feelings.
I don’t like dirty drivers either.
I’m not in favor of a “no rules & do whatever you want” approach.
I’m in favor of an approach that makes it more fun & rewarding to follow the rules instead of shrinking the online population by disqualifying so many players.
Do it. This franchise and the people in charge of it don’t care about you. I ditched my Xbox 3 or 4 years ago now, and don’t regret it one bit. I’m spoiled for choice between games like AMS2, AC, ACC, LMU, RaceRoom, iRacing, etc. And options for racing hardware and peripherals are essentially limitless.
Most “big” games from both Xbox and Playstation can be played on PC (with the one obvious exception being Gran Turismo), so you could still play FM23 if you really wanted to.
I know RAM and GPU prices aren’t exactly consumer-friendly these days, but you don’t need a top of the line system to run most racing sims…far from it. If you can find yourself some older or second hand parts, you can save money and still have a very capable rig.
I will definitely end up doing it. This message I wrote is simply the last chance I’m giving the game before I leave, like a kind of cry for help—on the off chance that there’s still someone left on the Turn10 ship who can read this and correct the course.
It really pains me to leave Forza, because since I was a kid it has given me many great moments. I am NOT asking for new updates or new content; I’m only asking that they finally use the tools the game has ALREADY had since the beginning and make it into what I always expected it to be—what they sold us it would be, and what it never became. If they had simply sold it as just another racing game, I wouldn’t be this disappointed. But during development, when they made us believe it would be something closer to LMU or iRacing, I got excited for nothing.
By the time this summer comes, if nothing has changed and there are no signs or announcements that anything is going to change, I will definitely go through with it.
The things you are requesting, have been requested for a long time and some have been implemented in forzas already.
Forza 6 introduced leagues which was a form of ranked racing, it was the beginning of them trying to separate players by skill and safety. In forza 7 they implemented hardcore lobbies which had full damage and no assists.
With this game they moved away from leagues and just had a dedicated rating system, with the idea it would work in every lobby. But the issue with this was, in the beginning people weren’t really separated as the algorithm was tuned to fill lobbies rather than fully separate by skill.
As time went on the algorithm was adjusted, but by then player numbers were reducing and more types of lobbies were added which diluted numbers further. This counteracted the change in algorithm as the less players you have, the less separation you have.
Hardcore lobbies were never added to multiplayer in this game, i couldn’t say why that is. Imo in an ideal world there should have been dedicated ranked lobbies, which would have fully separated players as well as have damage. Forza horizon 4 had ranked, but it was determined to be unfair or something like that so they decided not to put it in any forza, motorsport included.
When it comes down to it though, simcades are simcades for a reason. The vast majority of players are not hardcore, they aren’t trying to have fair clean racing, they just want to go fast and win. Simcades allow for this as theres a lower bar of entry and rules are less strict.
So while it would have been possible to add certain features and reinforce others, it just didn’t happen. It is now too late for them to add anything, no one’s there to do it. The game is what it is now, if you want those particular things you’d need to join a league or create one yourself. The game will remain live for whatever amount of time, but it will never change.
If that’s the course your set on, then why wait until the summer? They have already stated that there will not be any further updates. It took them months to admit this , when almost everybody believed it to be the case after the last update.
I wouldn’t believe anything t10 say now or in the future but on this you have to, as they have nothing to gain by misleading people.
I also feel the same way as you about Forza, however it is time to accept the facts. It sold really badly, this iteration did not attract anywhere near the player base for it to be viable, that had been obvious for a long time. The writing was on the wall after the painfully slow first year of updates.
As has been said no updates could save the game. especially one that would further dilute the very few players ( I assume) that are still playing.
Good post though, even if I don’t agree with your POV and I hope you find something that you enjoy as much as Forza. Personally I’m going to give Horizon 6 a real good go as I’ve never really invested much time in to it.
The games player numbers compare favorably to pretty much every other game out there besides horizon 5 and gt7. But considering the length of development and the fact that its on game pass, it just didnt generate enough revenue.
A good example of this is Call of duty, for some reason on the investor calls they seem to think a game that releases pretty much for free on game pass is still going to have as many sales as one that doesn’t.
The truth is, the way Microsoft is steering xbox, there’s almost no game or franchise that is safe. If its not a runaway hit, theres a good possibility the studio will be closed. This is on top of inexplicable increases in hardware prices as well as the huge jump in game pass subscription prices.
Forza Motorsport is just the first major totem to fall. I honestly see the other 2, Halo and Gears to follow in its footsteps when their sequels arrive, unless of course they’re on ps5.
The failure of BLOPS 7 was not a surprise to me at all. It is by far the worst COD game since BLOPS 4. Hint they both had no single player campaigns.
Hopefully that’s the end of that experiment but who knows. Seems like they were focusing on the helldivers crowd.
The LB’s and lobbies were tiny on FM23 (or at least that was impression) compared to 7 and by an order of magnitude smaller than six.
I played them all, 5 at EOL just before 6 but even that seemed to have way more players especially on LB’s
I think your first sentence kind of sums up the problem, Blops is not a failure, it had 18 million active users in November, it just isn’t as popular as past titles.
Just because something isn’t as good or as popular as a past entry doesn’t make it a failure or the worst game ever.
I think Forza Motorsport is in this category. While it has some bright spots it is inferior to some past titles. But it isn’t a horrible game, there are plenty worse out there.
As far as numbers go theres not much to go by. The last mclaren rival challenge numbers were 20k+ when I looked last, but its no longer there to see so i dont know what it got up to. Rivals is usually played by around 10% of the population, but at this point likelya higher percentage. So as of last month there were at least 20k people playing.
Lobbies in the more popular categories are pretty filled at the right times and people still populate meetups. Steam numbers are pretty much on par with historical numbers since release. Steam sales were roughly 400k copies.
I would have to assume most players would have played through gamepass on both xbox and pc. At one point I calculated using rival numbers on the number 1 played track and percent of players posting a rival time which was around 10%, there were over 2 million players who played the game. This was before the first summer after release before they wiped some of the leaderboards for various tracks.
Success and failure is relative in COD numbers. Obviously 18m players makes it easily the most played MS game of the year. I don’t have the exact quote to hand from the earnings call but it was clear the gaming division was down in Q4 v 2024 and below expectation
If something has performed below expectations does that not imply a failure?
That being said I’m sure it turned a profit or at least will do in its year, whether that’s a profit after a portion of $68B accusation is accounted for we don’t know, it is clear that they are very concerned with how the game performed though and that was clear after a couple of weeks of release.
Forza’s success or failure is not so relative though. The math on this one is very simple, it had to bring more income in then it cost to create. Obviously no financial data to back this up but seeing how MS are running their IPs it’s reasonable to assume that it didn’t.
I would say it depends on the expectations, especially if those expectations exceed reality. Last year they said they lost 400 million in cod sales because of xbox, when in reality it was because it was launched on game pass. In this case their expectation exceeded reality.
This year they decided to increase game pass ultimate prices right before cod’s release with the hope people would not pay for ultimate and would buy cod instead. This plan backfired as many people canceled game pass and still didnt buy cod. This expectation also exceeded reality.
Forza Motorsport, imo is one of many Microsoft titles that didn’t reach expectations, because almost none of them seem to. The numbers are simply never good enough no matter what they are or the reasons.
The truth is, if Motorsport didnt launch on game pass, it would have had more sales. Nevermind making more money, there’d be a lot more players invested in the game as most people stick with games they actually had to pay for.
So while some titles are strong enough to launch on game pass and stick around, others are not. Even the mighty forza horizon needed to be released on ps5 because no matter the player count, the bulk of those players didnt actually buy the game.
The days of Microsoft caring about xbox exclusives are over. Games like Motorsport were part of xbox’s identity, along with halo and gears. No matter their sales it was unthinkable they’d be canceled, but now we know they can be.
Like the movie industry, it’s simply not enough to make a great game, it has to be a runaway success. This is not a sustainable business model which is why this model is dying. Unfortunately it’s taking a lot of good games and developers with it.
BLOPS 6 also launched on GP and did well. It was a much, much better game at least IMO.
Do tend to agree on the whole GP sustainability issue. The ABK and other purchases were clearly aimed at driving subs and it doesn’t seem to have worked.
For sure more people would’ve bought FM 23 if it wasn’t on GP. I really don’t think it would have released in the shape it did had it not been for GP also.
The crucial part though, is it was built in mind to be a GP title, I really don’t think it was ever going to be a title to sell many new subs so this begs the question, what was the strategy? I think that was evident from the FOMO and the drip feed of content. Game pass retention and perhaps some paid DLC if not had been successful.
So what was dubbed the best deal in gaming in history is essentially killing itself. Unfortunately they’re too far down the road to course correct now.
Moral of the story: Don’t release a half-baked product on Game Pass, especially on day 1.
It was “bye bye” to pre-orders, sales, and the hooking in of casual Game Pass players.
Even Forza Motorsport 5 was a far more polished and complete package, for all it’s shortcomings.
Blop6 did release on game pass, hence the 400 million dollar sales loss Microsoft touted last year.
Imo this game had a very troubled development and I think the game as well as its strategy reflect that. When it was decided it would be a “forever" title, they chose the fomo route which is what horizon has had in place for some time.
The difference though imo, horizon can get away with some unpopular mechanics because it is the best game in its genre, forza motorsport can’t say the same thing.
I personally didnt have much of an issue with having to play the game to receive free content, but fomo is bad. I think the game being in the state it was in didnt help and people just didnt want to deal with it.
Personally I think there should have been a larger focus on features rather then content. Im not against new cars and tracks, but you need different things to do with them.