Forza Horizon 6 might be more of the same—in his 84% review, PC Gamer EIC Phil Savage said it was “riding a well-worn track”—but throw in some giant mechs, kei trucks, and Babymetal, and it turns out the world’s biggest open world racing series still sells like hotcakes.
As I write this, it’s sailing comfortably past the 300,000 concurrent players mark on Steam, according to SteamDB. That brings it into the top 5 most played games right now, past big dogs like Apex Legends and Slay the Spire 2 and only beat out by Dota 2, PUBG, and the eternal champion, Counter-Strike 2.
It was only a matter of time given that it was breaking series records on PC before it was even out. Forza’s simcade formula has made it a juggernaut among racing games and no amount of pre-release leaks seem able to slow it down. Maybe those 8,000-year bans helped with that last bit.
All this success makes it easier to predict Horizon may indeed be the future of Forza writ large. Last year, former Turn 10 employee Fred Russell said the main Motorsport series was dead after a monsoon of layoffs by Micosoft—one which cut Turn 10 in half, according to Jason Schreier. The more approachable spinoff appears to have left its forebear in the dust.
This success is in spite of the fact that Microsoft is currently listed as a pressure target, and Xbox a priority target, of the BDS movement protesting the tech giant’s contracts with Israel amid the ongoing genocide of Palestinians.
This has been a source of turmoil within the company: employees have led protests, developers at Microsoft-owned game studio Arkane have spoken out on the issue, and the company fired the head of an Israeli subsidiary over surveillance of Palestinians just earlier this month.
As for what’s next on FH6’s docket, developer Playground Games released a blog post Friday where it went over the first issues plans to address: drivatar AI difficulty, crash bugs, and optimization. In the meantime, check out our breakdown of the whopping 618 vehicles you can crash through billboards in the game right now.
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