Forza Horizon 5 – its creators have just exited the building (pic: Microsoft)
The creative director of Forza Horizon 5, and several other key developers at Playground Games, have left to start their own company.
The Forza Horizon series may be one of Microsoft’s most important Xbox exclusives, but British developer Playground Games has just lost most of the last game’s top talent, as they leave to form a new studio called Maverick Games.
Amongst those leaving are Forza Horizon 5 creative director Mike Brown and five others, including lead producer Tom Butcher, technical director Matt Craven, technical art director Gareth Harwood, audio director Fraser Stachan, and art director Ben Penrose.
The sextet of developers have revealed they’re already working on a new ‘premium open world game for consoles and PC’ but it’s unclear what it is or if the new studio will have any special relationship with Microsoft.
Microsoft has never gone into detail on how Playground Games divides its work but it’s believed that an entirely separate team is working on the new Fable, although it’s possible work on that game could still be affected to some degree.
Maverick has already hinted that their first game isn’t a racing game, with Brown telling GamesIndustry.biz that, ‘I’d definitely describe myself as an open world guy first, rather than a driving guy.’
‘The game will be open world, it will be AAA, it will be premium, it will have the ambition to go on and win all the awards…’
There’s also the implication that the game could be a live service title, with Brown highlighting the difficulties of grabbing and keeping people’s attention in the age of Game Pass and TikTok.
Microsoft has often had difficultly holding on to top talent, going all the way back to 2007, when Bungie famously left the company to return to being an independent studio.
More recently, new studio The Initiative reportedly saw 50% of its staff exit the company, with Tomb Raider developer Crystal Dynamics having to be brought in to help with work on the Perfect Dark reboot.
This followed general rumours that Microsoft was not being as hands-on as it needed to with its newly acquired studios, which is believed to be an overreaction to them previously being too domineering – which was blamed for the closure of major Xbox 360 era companies such as Lionhead Studios.
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The creative director of Forza Horizon 5, and several other key developers at Playground Games, have left to start their own company.
