Forza Horizon 5 races past 5M copies sold on PS5
We use Alinea Analytics estimates to dive deep (drive deep?) into the success of Forza Horizon 5 on PlayStation 5.
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Forza Horizon 5’s 5M PS5 copies helped it pass 50M players
Forza Horizon is one of Xbox’s most powerful franchises. Forza Horizon 5, which was released on Xbox and PC in 2021 and on PS5 in April, attracts over a million daily active users across all platforms. It’s surpassed 53 million players overall.
Around 23 million of these players accessed Forza via Game Pass. Xbox’s subscription strategy – while respectable and necessary – is starting to fade.
The average consumer can watch several movies and TV episodes a month or listen to hundreds of tracks, which explains the shift in distribution for music and video.
Playing games is different. Games are longer and more demanding. Most gamers are already served by the free-play markets, while others are happy to buy a few premium games a year. That’s cheaper than a Game Pass Ultimate subscription these days.
Xbox is visibly backtracking on its subscription strategy in favour of the ‘’everything’s an Xbox’’ direction. This has led to Xbox becoming a third-party publisher, porting many of its once-Xbox-only franchises to PS5.
Forza Horizon 5 has seen the most success there. It was ported at the end of April 2025, zooming past 5 million copies sold at the beginning of this month:
At 5.1M sold, the PS5 audience has generated over $300 million for the Forza franchise at a much-needed time for Microsoft’s Xbox subdivision, validating the pivot toward a platform-agnostic publishing model amid stagnating Game Pass subscriptions.
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Forza Horizon 5 copies sold on PS5: Strong sales with a long tail
Forza Horizon 5 has now sold twice as many copies as the previous top-selling Xbox port on PlayStation, Sea of Thieves, which recently sailed past 2.5M on Sony’s platform.
As you can see in the Alinea Platform screenshot below, Forza is selling about 3x faster than Sea of Thieves on PS5 (252 days in, launch aligned) and with a longer tail:
As the bulk of Forza’s development costs were amortised years ago via the Xbox/PC release, these PS5 sales represent almost pure high-margin profit.
Xbox is effectively double-dipping on aged R&D, turning a three-year-old catalogue title into a front-line revenue driver. It’s what Sony has been doing with Steam.
There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle either, so expect Xbox to double down on its multiplatform strategy even further.
The only PS5 console exclusive that outsold Forza Horizon 5 on PS5 last year was Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, which shifted 5.2 million PlayStation copies in 2025.
Pricing and discounts have also factored into Forza Horizon 5’s success on PS5
Forza launched at $60 on PS5, and our pricing data shows that there’ve been some significant discounts since launch (to $39, $36, and $30), helping to give the title a longer tail.
You can see daily copies sold (green line) versus price (yellow line) for the past four months below:
A few takeaways from the above data:
The 50% discount in September (to $29.99) had the strongest relative performance, moving daily copies sold from an average of 6K units to 21K units – a 3.4x increase.
The Black Friday price drop to $38.99 (a 35% discount) yielded a 2.9x uplift on average. This price point had roughly 50% less daily sales compared to the sub-$30 September promotion, but Forza had a lot of other heavily discounted games to compete with.
The December holiday sale at $35.99 nailed the highest single-day peak (33K units), but the overall average uplift was lower (2.6x) than previous sales.
Just like games on Steam in the same period, the discount combined with higher holiday spending helped give Forza its highest peak on PS5 since launch, not the discount alone.
Forza Horizon 5 served underserved arcade racer fans on PS5 – a nice product-market fit
Of course, Forza’s audience is relatively casual and falls outside the typical core gamer space we often cover. We can glean some insights from the player crossover here. Of Forza Horizon 5 players on PS5:
89% have played GTA 5.
87% have played Fortnite.
72% have played Rocket League.
And looking at games released last year:
30% of Forza Horizon 5 players on PS5 played EA Sports FC 26.
12% played NBA 2K26.
11% played College Football.
But just 9% played ARC Raiders and 8% played Ghost of Yōtei.
Versus the average gamer, Forza Horizon 5 players on PS5 heavily over-index for playing mainstream sports and live-service games, and they under-index for playing titles popular among core gamers.
Gran Turismo has catered to PlayStation gamers when it comes to sim racers, but the player base had less of a go-to choice for arcadey racers.
Ubisoft somewhat filled this gap previously. Around half of Forza Horizon 5 players on PS5 previously played 2018’s The Crew 2, while 35% played 2023’s The Crew Motorfest. Around 24% have played 2022’s Gran Turismo 7.
For reference, Gran Turismo 7 has passed 11M copies sold overall on PlayStation (81% via PS5), while the more arcadey The Crew Motorfest has passed 8M.
All this suggests that the reasoning for Forza’s success on PlayStation is clear: there was a player segment hungry for a best-in-class arcade racer, and Forza Horizon 5 had a product-market fit for that.
Sony abandoned the pure arcade genre (RIP DriveClub), leaving the car door wide open for Microsoft to capture market share on Sony’s own turf. PlayStation is taking a 30% cut of all those sales, so I’m not sure it’s too bothered, though.
As you can see in the chart below, Forza Horizon 5 has enjoyed a far better product-market on PS5 than any other 2025 Xbox-to-PlayStation port:
Forza Horizon 6 is on track for success across the board
Needless to say, Forza Horizon 6 will do gangbusters on all platforms, including PlayStation. Word on the street is that it’s coming to PS5 after Xbox and PC, but I think that’s a mistake.
Launching day-in-date is the way. The fanbase is already there, and the Japan setting will appeal to the Japanese market that Xbox misses. The elephant in the room is that it will also appeal to the many weebs on Sony consoles. Despite trying hard to make a dent in Japan, Xbox has historically struggled with a Western-centric brand image.
Leveraging JDM (Japanese domestic market) car culture might also help Microsoft bypass their hardware limitations in Asia and use Forza Horizon as a Trojan horse for the Xbox ecosystem, even if that’s via Steam, which is growing in prominence in Japan, or via a PlayStation.
I’d release it on Switch 2 as well, if I were Xbox. That’d fly off the increasingly proverbial shelves, and Xbox has to target the Series S and lower-spec PCs anyway.
Cool links and other stuff
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