Forza Horizon 5 Tops 15 Million Players - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 09 January 2022 / 8,021 Views
The November released open-world racing game, Forza Horizon 5, has reached a new milestone with over 15 million players, according to the Hall of Fame leaderboards.
This figure is up from 10 million players in its first week. It had the biggest first week in Xbox and Xbox Game Pass history.
It has taken Forza Horizon 5 just two months to reach 15 million players. This compares to Sea of Thieves that took two years and four months to reach the same milestone.
Forza Horizon 5 is available now for the Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PC, and Xbox Game Pass.
Exactly two months after its release, Forza Horizon 5 has crossed the 15 million players mark.
— MauroNL (@MauroNL3) January 9, 2022
Congrats to the team @WeArePlayground on the well deserved success! ? pic.twitter.com/f169Q58Smy
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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This is still a massive achievement even though this game is available on gamepass. You would have to guess a massive portion if not an outright majority of these players paid the box price. Even if we assume a full 2/3 of the player base is just gamepass players (which seems unrealistic to me), 5 million sales over the course of 2 months is outstanding
Getting Gamepass is far cheaper than buying a full-priced game. Even if you buy it out of promo, you can still buy half a year of it, for the full price of H5. I would be shocked if more than 20% of the sales were at full price. And there is nothing wrong with that. Gamepass is a great deal, and games like FH5 showcase why it is a worthy investment.
I don’t think this is realistic. Let’s assume in fact 80% of the playerbase is gamepass downloads. That would be 12 million players.
MS’s last publicly stated gamepass subscriber count was 18 million. That would mean an attach rate of 66% for Forza Horizon 5. For a 90 gig racing game? That’s outlandish.
I also think the gaming enthusiast and forum poster community vastly overestimates the amount of people that hyper optimize their gamepass sub and/or try to game the system loading up on cheap/subsidized gamepass. I think Occam’s Razor applies here, and the most likely outcome is just that a lot of people heard hype about this game and just went and bought it
Might be true, might not. Until MS throws our way some real numbers we won't know. You should also keep in mind that in 2 months' time, a certain percentage of new physical players are second-hand purchasers, so even with a percentual higher number, raw sales will always be lower. Also, judging by the reviews and hype the game generated, I would not be shocked if 2/3 of Gamepads players tried it out. It looks like the franchise became by far the biggest IP MS currently owns.
Good point about some physical players playing second-hand copies. I'd add that if you played the game on someone else's "Home Xbox" with your gamertag, then you are counted as a player even if you didn't buy the game, and aren't a Game Pass subscriber. So someone who buys the game who has friends, relatives, or roommates who tried the game with their own gamertags, in other words. But it's still a huge number, no matter how you slice it. I doubt Dirt, Need For Speed, Drive Club, etc., is putting up Forza Horizon numbers. Hell, even Forza Motorsport isn't putting up Forza Horizon numbers.
You raise an interesting point that Forza may be Microsoft's most valuable IP. Unlike Halo and Gears, Forza is the one franchise that they're A) capable of producing (nearly) annual instalments of, and that B) it sells well despite this nearly "Call of Duty" level of frequency. It helps that they vary it up between "Horizon" and "Motorsport".
The 18 million Game Pass subscribers was from the summer, so the number is probably higher now (no doubt thanks in part to the launches of Forza Horizon 5 and Halo Infinite). But I agree with your fundamental point, that it's unlikely that 50%+ of Game Pass subscribers downloaded FH5.
However, FH5 is available for game streaming to all the usual suspects (PC, mobile, and console), so someone with Game Pass Ultimate can stream it to check it out, so those people have an option to try it before committing to the 90 GB download. But we're not sure what proportion of Game Pass subscribers have Ultimate, and what proportion of those use streaming.
Mobile, definitely not. You'd be streaming the Xbox version of the game to you, running off an Xblade, and you'd be logged in via the same Microsoft Account.
For PC, I think you have to have an Xbox account and log in with it, at least to be included in the leaderboards you do. So no, I don't think that inflates the numbers at all.
I can answer this because I’ve done it, no it does not. If I play on Xbox, and then log in on PC with the same Microsoft account, I still only count as one user. My save progress also automatically carries over, as Microsoft offers free unlimited cloud saves and cross progress on all first party titles. All Microsoft first party titles are also Xbox play anywhere, so if you buy the Xbox version game you also get a windows store license if the game for free (although that also only counts as one sale/user).
That's from the users and accounts end, my point and I may be wrong is Microsoft's definition of player count when they tally up the numbers may not be bound to the account being used for Xbox/ PC/Mobile play but a correlation of raw numbers on each it wouldn't be the first time that corporations use the figures that best represent them but like I said I may be wrong and I'm only speculating since it seems pretty vague to me , still good to get some concrete info from you in regards to those accounts .
Considering that the game is still popping up in the top 10 weekly best-sellers on Steam, and that it sold 1 million copies even before release, I'm willing to bet that more than 20% of that number has come from sales.
Also, we know it had to best launch month ever for a Forza game in the U.S. in sales. Key word "SALES". Despite being on GamePass.
Hmmm, I was not aware of the million preorders. That bodes well for higher than usual sales. But the best opening in the US is not really a clear number. I guess it needed to pass FH4 and FH3, but when 4 was released GP was already a thing. I mean we could speculate as much as we want, but we will probably never know the true percentage. At least no matter what, the game is a massive hit.
The leaderboard had about 2 million people in it already by the end of the early access period. The early access period was 4 days before launch, and to get in you had to either buy the Premium edition of the game, or buy the upgrade to the Premium edition content. So these people were paying either $90-ish for the Premium edition, or $45-ish for the Premium upgrade to the Standard edition (as the Standard edition is what's in Game Pass).
Oh, and they actually had to play the game, too, as presumably some number of people (however small) bought Premium with the intention of playing it, but life got in the way and they didn't get around to actually doing so during the 4 day early access period.
Set against that is that friends/roommates/relatives of people who bought Premium could use their own gamertags to play on the purchaser's Home Xbox. So perhaps the actual total of people who bought Premium before launch is about 1.5-1.8 million?
But anyone who bought the Standard edition of the game couldn't play it until launch day, so we can be confident that millions more actually bought the game. We just can't be sure HOW many millions more. :)
How many players did FH4 have?
The game did not have an in game public leaderboard so real time numbers aren’t possible to get, but Microsoft said shortly before FH5 launched that FH4 passed 25 million lifetime players
That's just massive. The Horizon series made racing games cool again.
The last racing game I played before FH5 was GT2 and I must admit that the game is super fun and good to do quick play so not surprised how many people are playing it considering it's on GP.
I would love to know what actual sales numbers are. The only official number in regards to sales is at least 2 million since that’s how many were playing the game before it launched on Game Pass which was either buying the $99 premium edition or the $50 premium add on if you were on Game Pass. So we know the game is still selling at full price. Would be to cool to know the exact number of that 15 million though.
It would be cool to know that. Though a caution with that 2 million figure, since that was unique players, and multiple people can play the game on someone's "Home Xbox" with their unique gamertags. Someone whose roommates, friends, and family played FH5 would have inflated that figure. But it's probably still at least 1.5 million sales of the premium package before launch, which is still super impressive since they could have waited a few more days, and gone without the premium content, and paid nothing extra.
Also consider that 15 million people have played the game and last we knew there were only about 18 million Game Pass subscribers. There are likely more than 18 million by now, but we're not sure how many more. But either a lot of people have bought this game, or almost everyone on Game Pass has tried it out. Either would be really impressive! But the truth is probably a little bit of column A, and a little bit of column B. :)
The "home xbox" trick i really doubt covers many of the players. You can also look at the steam sales and see the game is in the top grossing new releases of all of 2021.
I've been trying to come up with decent numbers by comparing to Rainbow six siege via steam, but you have to make so many assumptions about the preferences of PC vs console players that it doesn't get you very far.
You're probably right that it probably doesn't encompass a lot of players. I imagine a lot of the time they either don't have their own gamertag, or don't bother to install it on the system, when playing on someone else's Xbox. It's hard to know either way, though.
Or people like me that signed up for gamepass during the $1/3month promotion. That must have greatly impacted the numbers.
Is this active players playing it multiple times or people that played a few laps and stopped? I downloaded Dirt 5 when it was a ps+ game played it for 10 minutes, got my taste to see that I still don't care about racing games and deleted it. Regardless its still impressive and good for the game to get as many people possible playing it. Whenever I sign back up for Gamepass I'll probably give it a shot. I have to imagine with Gamepass numbers rising quick we are going to be seeing major games passing this up as the numbers rise.
I believe this is a unique account playing the game once.
It took Sea of Thieves 2 and 4 months?
