That, in turn, raises serious questions about whether Xbox would actually be making the right call by leaning back toward exclusivity.
Forza Horizon 5 launched on PlayStation 5 last year, and within only a few months it was already obvious that the game had become a major success on Sony’s platform, even outperforming some first-party releases on the sales charts. Development partner Virtuos has now confirmed that the racing game it helped support ended up as one of 2025’s best-selling titles, surpassing 5 million copies sold worldwide.
The studio stated that Forza Horizon 5 was one of the best-selling games on PlayStation 5 in 2025, moving more than 5 million copies on that platform alone while also earning broad acclaim, including a 92 Metacritic score. It also explained in more detail what its contribution to the project actually was. According to Virtuos, the team worked on roughly 90% of the photorealistic vehicles featured in the base game and its DLC. On top of that, it delivered extensive environmental assets and characters, built comprehensive texture libraries and biome-specific visual detail elements, and produced advanced vehicle animations and damage systems.
The fact that Forza Horizon 5 is selling this well on PlayStation 5 fully five years after its debut on PC and Xbox Series is not only a very strong signal ahead of this year’s expected arrival of Forza Horizon 6, it also sends a clear message to the wider market. There have been rumors that Microsoft is actively discussing some kind of return to console exclusivity, but when you look at how well Playground Games’ title has performed on a rival platform, it becomes very hard to justify walking away from that kind of revenue just to revive a concept that might sound nostalgic, but probably makes very little business sense for Xbox in 2026.
With Xbox Project Helix apparently targeting the PC space more than the traditional console one, and reportedly arriving without custom GPU work, effectively shedding the last major hardware trait that made an Xbox feel distinctly like an Xbox, the picture increasingly suggests that the next-generation system may not even be a traditional console in the old sense, but something closer to a machine that emulates a console experience.
Given how strongly some of these games are performing on competing platforms, a return to the older, more closed strategy looks less and less likely by the day.
