Forza Horizon's Creator Left Over Xbox's Fear of Change

Forza Horizon 6 just crossed nearly 5 million copies sold before its first full weekend, hit 6 million total players counting Game Pass, and is sitting on yet another 90-plus Metacritic score. By every measurable standard, the series has never been healthier. And the man who built it from nothing says he had to leave because Xbox refused to let him make it better.

Gavin Raeburn, the founder of Playground Games and the person most responsible for Forza Horizon existing at all, spoke to Forbes in April about why he walked away in 2022. His answer was blunt: "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." He described a studio and a publisher that had found a formula and locked it in place, with Xbox unwilling to countenance real innovation and Playground itself settling into what he called "a bit of complacency, perhaps."

That's a striking thing to say about a studio riding a streak of four consecutive 90-plus-rated games. But Raeburn's frustration makes sense when you look at the series honestly. Playground has made two meaningful structural changes to Forza Horizon across its entire lifespan: full off-road free-roam in the second game, and seasonal live-service playlists in the fourth. Everything else has been refinement. Beautiful, polished, crowd-pleasing refinement, sure. But refinement isn't evolution, and Raeburn clearly wanted evolution.

Lighthouse on the Horizon

Raeburn's new studio, Lighthouse Games, is based just streets away from Playground's offices in Royal Leamington Spa. It's funded by Tencent and staffed with veterans from both Playground and Codemasters, where Raeburn previously led Dirt, Grid, and F1. He told Forbes that Lighthouse has the formula for "the next generation of racing games" and promised it would be "just as big a jump as Horizon was from Dirt 2." He even took a shot at his former colleagues and competitors like Ivory Tower, the studio behind The Crew, saying they're making "mistakes" Lighthouse will avoid. "I want them to keep making them," he said.

I find this fascinating because Raeburn isn't some disgruntled middle manager. He built the thing. He knows exactly where its ceiling is and what it would take to break through it. And he's saying, publicly, that Xbox's conservatism is what stopped him. That lines up with a broader pattern we've seen from Xbox over the past few years: a platform that acquires studios and then struggles to let them take creative risks. It's the same instinct that kept Halo spinning in place for a decade.

The irony is that Forza Horizon 6 is proving Raeburn right on both counts simultaneously. The game is a massive commercial hit, with third-party data from Alinea Analytics suggesting 4.9 million copies sold across Xbox and Steam by May 22nd alone, plus over 3 million Game Pass players on top. SteamDB shows it cracked 300,000 concurrent PC players over the weekend. Xbox's strategy of not changing the formula is working, commercially. But the game's most talked-about "feature" right now is a rogue AI drivatar called Bowie Knife99 that rams players off the road and beats them in drag races with a souped-up Peel P50 tricycle. Players are so entertained by this one broken bot that it's become the game's defining meme. When the most exciting thing about your racing game is an NPC that doesn't follow the rules, maybe the guy who wanted to break the rules had a point.

Lighthouse hasn't shown anything yet, and big promises from new studios backed by Tencent money are easy to make. Raeburn could be wrong. But he's not the only one trying. Maverick Games, another studio founded by Playground veterans, has also teased its own open-world racer. The people who built Forza Horizon keep leaving to build something they think is better, and Xbox keeps shipping the same game to record sales. According to Forbes, Raeburn didn't share his big ideas, but he appeared confident that nobody else, including Playground, has figured them out. Lighthouse's first game has no announced release window.