Playground Games has turned its sights on Japan, hitting the highway to success even as part of Microsoft’s subscription service.
Forza Horizon 6 was released earlier this week, or at the end of last week if you bought the Premium Edition – it’s Microsoft’s custom to make the more expensive edition playable a few days early -, and according to Alinea Analytics, Playground Games’ latest racing game unsurprisingly has been a massive hit: estimates put first-week sales at nearly 5 million copies, generating $325 million in gross revenue. The game had no trouble selling millions of copies at launch, despite being available on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass for subscribers right from the start. More copies were sold on Steam, but there wasn’t a huge difference between the number of copies sold on Steam and Xbox.
Sales on Xbox accounted for 42% of total sales, an estimated 2.1 million copies, compared to an estimated 2.8 million on Steam. Additionally, Alinea Analytics estimated that another 3 million players tried the game through their Xbox Game Pass Ultimate/PC Game Pass subscriptions. The news came after Playground Games had already celebrated the game reaching a total of over 6 million players.
Overall, Forza Horizon 6 has been a huge success for Playground Games and Xbox. This comes as no surprise given that the series has long been one of Xbox’s best first-party titles. Forza Horizon 5 also earned critical acclaim, but Forza Horizon 6 far surpassed it with an average score of 91 on Metacritic. It will be interesting to see if Playground can achieve the same critical and commercial success with Fable, which the studio recently confirmed is still on track for a 2026 release. We reported on this in today’s news.
