Playground Games, developer of the critically acclaimed Forza Horizon series, announced today that they are opening a new studio to develop a non-racing game. Founder, Ralph Fulton gave the following statement:
Opening another studio is something we’ve been talking about for a good few years, but we’ve been keen not to rush into it. It’s a great opportunity for us to test ourselves in a different genre.
We feel like we’ve become pretty good at racing games over the years. We can always get better, we can always strive to get better but we’d love to prove ourselves in a different genre. That’s another goal of Project 2, to allow us to do that. We’re going to need to hire some very talented people with experience that we don’t have.
Our business with Forza over the last six, seven years has been great for us. It remains the cornerstone of our business – we’re not running away from racing, we still feel passionate about making new racing games and delivering new experiences for our players.
You can find the official statement via Windows Central here: Playground Games Announcement
Our Take
This is an interesting announcement as Playground Games is incredibly talented but we have yet to see any titles outside of the racing genre from them. Also, while the Forza Horizon series has been exclusively on Xbox platforms (and Play Anywhere in the case of Forza Horizon 3), Playground Games is not a first party studio for Microsoft. Thus any future title they create could theoretically land on other platforms. We’ll be keeping an eye on this development.
