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

ign.com:

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.”

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