Forza Horizon 5 Breaks Xbox Records

Forza Horizon 5 is off to a fantastic start, it would seem. Xbox boss Phil Spencer revealed on Twitter that the racing game has already reached 4.5 million players across console, PC, and the cloud.

Forza Horizon 5 also becomes the “largest launch day” for an Xbox Game Studios title (though the title it dethroned was not revealed), and it heat a peak concurrent player figure that was 3X bigger than Forza Horizon 4’s peak concurrent record. “Thank you players and congrats to [Playground Games],” Spencer said.

The executive said Microsoft’s multi-year investment into opening up Xbox games for more people through PC, the cloud, and Game Pass is now paying off in a big way. “Forza Horizon 5 shows that promise coming to life,” Spencer said.

Unlike past entries in the series, no one needs to buy Forza Horizon 5 outright to play it. The game is included on Game Pass for Xbox and PC, and it’s available on mobile phones and tablets, too, through the cloud. You no longer need a console or PC to play many of Microsoft’s Xbox games. Spencer has been saying for some time that Microsoft no longer measures success on a unit sales basis for games or systems, but rather, the company defines success as having more people playing Xbox games wherever they are, on whatever hardware they might have.

Given the very strong start for Forza Horizon 5, it’ll be interesting to see how Microsoft’s next big game, Halo Infinite, performs in the market. Not only is the game included with Game Pass, but the multiplayer element is completely free-to-play, so its potential audience is massive.

GameSpot’s Forza Horizon 5 review scored the racing game a 9/10. “Forza Horizon 5 is another meaningful evolution of the series as opposed to a reinvention, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a case of more of the same,” reviewer Alessandro Barbosa said. “Even when it is familiar, Forza Horizon 5 makes small, but thoughtful changes to its established blueprint that hones in on the people behind the cars in a way that the franchise has previously just glossed over.”