Forza Horizon 5 eclipsed Forza Motorsport sales

This month, we learned that Microsoft had shut down several studios and cancelled a number of major projects. One of the studios hit the hardest was Turn 10, Microsoft's first-party studio responsible for the Forza Motorsport series of racing games. Forza Motorsport has apparently been cancelled for the foreseeable future, in favour of the much better performing Forza Horizon series. 

According to one former Turn 10 employee writing on LinkedIn, Forza Horizon 5 sold two million copies in one month when it launched on PS5 earlier this year. The sales success of the Forza Horizon series appears to have overtaken the classic Forza Motorport series, which focused more on realistic track racing, while Forza Horizon offers a large open-world playground with street races, track races, rally races and more.

While Steam player counts aren't always a great indicator as to how well a game sold, Forza Motorsport, achieved just 4,700 peak concurrent players at launch. Meanwhile, Forza Horizon 4 and Forza Horizon 5 peaked at 75K concurrent players and 82K concurrent players respectively. The Forza Horizon games have just been far more popular than Turn 10's more traditional Forza games.

Moving forward, Turn 10 is reportedly going to be a support studio for the Forza Horizon games, with Playground Games taking charge. Playground Games has grown into a multi-project studio since being acquired by Microsoft in 2018 and now works on both Forza Horizon and Microsoft's cult-classic RPG series, Fable.

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KitGuru Says: Racing games are a niche genre, but Forza Horizon is built to attract more casual gamers, while Forza Motorsport was primarily made for the hardcore racing crowd. Considering how poorly Forza Motorport did, it is not surprising to see Horizon being prioritised moving forward. 

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