As the new Forza Horizon 5 racing video game from Playground Games comes out this Tuesday, November 9, nearly a million players have already warmed up the engines on Mexico’s virtual roads via the Premium Edition.
Many fans of the license were waiting for the return of the racing game from Playground Games. Forza Horizon 5, officially released this Tuesday, November 9 on Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and S and PC. But in reality, the title is already available for some players since last Thursday: those who have the Premium edition or those who subscribe to the Premium pack via Xbox Game Pass.
Revealing rankings
It was therefore necessary to have put your hand in the wallet to enjoy the game before others: the Premium edition is sold at a price of € 99.99, the Premium extension via the Game Pass, at € 44.99. This means that Forza Horizon 5 has already grossed between € 44,990,000 and € 99,990,000.
These are the “leaderboards”, the leaderboards that revealed the number of players this weekend. By way of comparison, Forza Horizon 4 had sold 480,000 copies during its launch week and then exceeded 24 million in sales.
Just 24 hours after the game’s official release and after a few days of early access, Phil Spencer took to Twitter to announce that Forza Horizon 5 has attracted more than 4.5 million players across consoles, PC, and the cloud. That’s three times more than the launch day of Forza Horizon 4.
A crowd saw before in the history of Xbox Game Studios games, whose biggest launches include those of the Xbox 360 Halo, which had more than 3 million sales in the month of their launch in the United States alone, but obviously did not take advantage of the current circumstances of the Microsoft ecosystem, namely a simultaneous release on PC and a presence in the Xbox Game Pass subscription. While the latter hasn’t grown as fast as Microsoft hoped, it’s estimated that over 20 million subscribers can download the game at no additional cost.
But the Xbox Game Pass subscription isn’t the only factor responsible for the success of Forza Horizon 5 , whose online rankings already had one million players even before the official release on November 9, thanks to people who pre-ordered the Premium Edition. to get early access. Current number 1 in sales on Steam, Forza Horizon 5 has achieved a peak of 70,000 players connected simultaneously, already clearly surpassing the record for Forza Horizon 4 (40,000 players) on this same platform. Remember that Steam statistics do not include Xbox Game Pass subscribers.