Time for a change

In March 2023, his next step was revealed: Lighthouse Games, where he was joined by big hitters from his past roles at Codemasters and Playground Games. Nearly three years to the day since his new company made its presence known, Raeburn believes he and his team have the formula for the next generation of racing games, even if it took another brave leap to get the ball rolling.

“I’ve joked recently that I think every head of a development team should be forced to move on, or should of their own accord move on, every 10 years, because when you build a studio, and you build tech, you build it at a point in time,” he says.

“You build a certain culture, you build the tech and know it’s fit for that purpose then, but over time it’s not: things start to unravel, things set in stone, even a bit of complacency, perhaps, but primarily if you want to do something new, you want to take what you’ve learned at a previous company.”

With five Forza Horizons under his belt, the desire to innovate in a different way became too strong to ignore. “For myself, it was similar to leaving Codemasters,” Raeburn says. “I needed to go off and build something else, just as big a jump as Horizon was from DiRT 2.”

On the bleeding edge of racing games

When you consider Raeburn’s career — specifically, racing games — it’s not exactly surprising that he made the jump, given he played a part in some of the most genre-defining titles of the last 30 years.

He entered the industry as a teenager in 1986 after selling his first title, side-scroller Thunderbolt, to Codemasters for £3,000, before becoming one of the studio’s earliest employees. Over the following decades, he helped shape the company’s racing portfolio, working on groundbreaking franchises such as TOCA Touring Cars, Colin McRae Rally, TOCA Race Driver, DiRT, and GRID.

In 2010, just after Codemasters released DiRT 2 — and was gearing up for a multi-year deal on the F1 game franchise — Raeburn had itchy feet. Money was tight at Codemasters, and its marketing budgets were very small. As a result, the team created releases instinctively — a “by gamers, for gamers” approach.

“We knew what we liked,” he says, “but we were basically creating games that we wanted to play, that we thought the audience would like, that we wanted to play ourselves, which is, for the record, a terrible thing to do.”

While Raeburn was really excited for Formula 1, he didn’t want to do the sequels. “We’d been pushing to create a second game. We had lots of ideas, but by being given F1, I couldn’t do that. I’d loved Test Drive Unlimited. I’d loved Midnight Club: Los Angeles. They were open-world driving games that I really, really enjoyed and were influential on me, and that’s where I saw the future of a broad audience for driving.

“That was the reason that I wanted to leave, so I did.”

The perfect fit

In the early days of Playground Games, Raeburn found it a lot harder to find a deal than he expected. “I was lucky,” he continues. “I was joined by a bunch of great people from Codemasters on the journey. But getting that deal was really hard.”

He put all his savings into the company at the end of the financial crash, just as mobile gaming was hitting its stride. People were telling him that consoles were dying, while publishers weren’t releasing funds as they once had. But then, a breakthrough: Xbox was looking to expand one of its flagship racing series and needed a new team to do it.

Raeburn says that Xbox and Turn 10 Studios were “just a perfect fit for us in almost every way.” It was also ideal for Xbox, as Raeburn discovered years later. He explains that Don Mattrick, who was leading the Xbox business at the time, requested that internal development teams adopt an annual franchise plan for their games.

“So those games that were being delivered every two years, like Forza Motorsport, were now told, right, well, you have to release every year. There’s no way the Forza Motorsport team could do that. So that was the reason they were looking for a second team. That said, at the time, they didn’t quite know what they wanted for that second project. That was down to us to decide and pitch for.”

At the time, Raeburn didn’t know that Playground Games was up against 16 other developers — something Xbox didn’t mention. It turns out this dedication to secrecy went both ways. “There were certain things that [Xbox] loved when they came to visit us that we kept secret. That was a really big thing for Turn 10, keeping this all under wraps.

“We just worked our socks off to impress them, and produced a demo that impressed them enormously. So we just eked our way in, but then the relationship built and built and built after that.”

Listening to players — but not too much

Under Raeburn’s leadership, Playground grew rapidly, transforming from a startup into a major UK studio while helping redefine the direction of modern racing games. It immediately proved far from Codemasters’ more vibe-based environment.

Xbox and Turn 10 were very data-driven — “perhaps too much so” at one point, Raeburn admits — but the team learned from it, using it to qualify or inform its decisions every step of the way. They did their best to balance community expectations with Forza Horizon, particularly regarding the franchise’s locations. “There is instinct, but mostly it’s data and process,” he says. “It’s all categorized, and then you see what bubbles to the top.”

Playground ran a process with new game locations, a series of locations shortlisted for various reasons, which were then tested against biome diversity, new gameplay opportunities, differences from previous games, and the ability to research them, among other factors.

“So, [Forza Horizon 3’s] Australia was a surprise,” Raeburn says. “That came to the top because it’s a hugely biodiverse country and a wonderful place to be. After that, it was the U.K.; we threw it into the mix at the last moment. We’re so close to the U.K., you don’t see how beautiful it can be, but it was also very different from Australia — different climate, different sun position, different lighting. That’s what made it shine at the end. We had ice, we had snow, we had the seasons, and they worked well in the U.K.”

Japan, the setting for Forza Horizon 6, was always on the table and demanded by many players, but research proved otherwise. Despite increasingly desperate clamor, Raeburn felt it was off-limits, especially with Forza Horizon 5. A big city like Tokyo may have seemed very different on the surface, but he saw it as too similar to the U.K. — its seasons, farmland, and other factors would look too alike.

“More importantly, when we ran it through our process, it just didn’t land at the top: Mexico shone out as being this wonderful new place to go to,” he says. “I found this to my cost in the past: be very careful and wary about listening to the vocal minority because important though they are, really important, they are not the voice of the many, but they are very loud.”

Starting again in a tougher industry

Despite Raeburn and his team’s backgrounds, the launch of Lighthouse Games was still a massive risk, given how much the industry is now increasingly defined by layoffs, closures, and cancellations.

“Three or four years ago, you could drop a hat and get X million pounds to start a new studio if you had the faintest link to any other successful game,” Raeburn says. “It was just incredible. I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing. But obviously, that’s changed over the last few years; the purse strings have tightened up. It’s a lot harder for devs to get deals now.”

Tencent initially invested in Lighthouse Games in 2023, three months after the studio announced itself to the world, followed by an undisclosed but “game-changing” sum investment in mid-2025, which has allowed Lighthouse to grow, build its technology, and prototype early ideas.

“It’s everything that you want to do as a studio. That has worked well, and our relationship has grown and developed over the last three years. It feels just like we’re working with Xbox in that sense: a wonderfully supportive partner. And it is a partnership.

“I think what I’ve been impressed by with Tencent is [...] they play video games. They are fairly new to the Western market, perhaps, but they play video games. That is so refreshing to see. I liked that at Xbox, Phil Spencer and Matt Booty play video games, and it does make a big difference. You don’t get that at many publishers in the West. It just makes certain conversations quite challenging, especially with new ideas.”

The risks that publishers no longer take

Even with Tencent’s backing, Raeburn is cautious about his studio, as he has consistently taken risks to create something new. It’s understandable, especially with hindsight — in the weeks following our conversation, fellow Playground Games spin-out studio Maverick Games, which is developing an open-world racing game, had its publishing deal with Amazon Game Studios canceled.

“Budgets are going up, and that’s part of the reason we’ve seen a boom and bust,” Raeburn says. “You just need to have one failure, and it can put your company in jeopardy, whether [you’re] a publisher or a developer.”

In 2026, if you have something that’s new and innovative, many publishers don’t join you for the ride in the way they once did, he explains.

“‘New’ is difficult for them to understand,” he says. “Why would they want to take a risk when they could buy the same company for 10 times the amount later, once it’s proven it’s a success? That’s the comment I had from one publisher, which was astonishing.”

A competitive mindset

With Lighthouse Games, Raeburn has a straightforward mantra: constantly look over your shoulder, do everything you can to be successful, and never slip into complacency.

“There’s only so much you can do,” he says. “All you can really do is focus on what you are building to make it the best you possibly can, so that’s what I do. It’s not just one or two decisions; it’s tens of thousands of decisions. You try to make everything a little bit better. You question everything you do while you’re doing it. That’s what you do to stay at the top of your game.”

When Playground was producing the first Horizon game, Need for Speed set the bar, and was the company’s only major competitor on Xbox. Raeburn was told that he’d never beat it — but the team developed a mentality to keep pushing.

“By the time we got to Forza Horizon 3, I was looking out for competition like, well, what’s Ivory Tower going to be doing next? What’s the next Need for Speed? You should always think, well, just because they may be in a certain position now, sales-wise, doesn’t mean that’s where they’re going to be for the next game. Again, it just comes back to push, push, push, push, push, innovate, innovate.

“I like to be fearful of the competition I can’t see.”

No mistaking it

Even after three years of development, we still don’t have any real details of Lighthouse Games’ debut racing game. While Raeburn expertly deflected every sneaky question about his next title, one thing’s certain in his mind: “The fans we had for Horizon will love this for sure.”

While the driving game market is a decent size overall, Raeburn still thinks it’s underserved by the number of good titles available. “You can count on one hand the number of good casual or broad-audience driving games that there are, which is astonishing,” he says, “and that shows the appetite there is. People want to play driving games. They’re even playing driving games that aren’t necessarily that good.

“I think Ivory Tower is doing wonderful things with The Crew. They’re knocking on the door, and that’s where Horizon is. We just want to play in that league. It’s not like one game is going to beat another. There’s just an audience out there who wants to play more than one great driving game. That’s where we want to be.”

Raeburn also takes great delight from the number of people who’ve joined him from Codemasters and Playground, taking his team to over 60 from both companies — “the best in the business,” he says. With this team, there’s a quiet confidence about his next debut, especially as he believes that major developers still make simple mistakes, which he knows Lighthouse won’t replicate.

“And I hope they keep making them,” Raeburn says, with a wry smile. But will he say what they are? “No, I want them to keep making them.”