Highlights
- Forza Horizon 5 on PS5 surpassed 5 million units sold, generating over $300 million in revenue.
- The title outpaced major 2025 releases like Astro Bot, effectively ending the era of Xbox exclusivity.
- Forza Horizon 6 launches May 19, 2026, with 511,000+ pre-sales already recorded on Steam.
It is official: Xbox’s flagship racer, Forza Horizon 5, is a certified blockbuster on the PlayStation 5. Despite being a four-year-old title, the open-world racing game has shattered expectations since its April 2025 port, surpassing 5 million copies sold on Sony’s console. According to data from Alinea Analytics, this performance has raked in more than $300 million USD in revenue, with 2 million units sold in one month on PS5 alone.
The game's success is not just about the numbers; it’s about the dominance. In 2025, Forza Horizon 5 outpaced major new releases like Astro Bot and Death Stranding 2. Co-developer Virtuos, which handled a significant portion of the port, confirmed the milestone on their website, noting that the title maintained its stellar 92 Metacritic score while becoming one of the best-selling games on the platform for the entire year.
This "seismic shift" in strategy effectively signals the end of the traditional console-exclusive era for Microsoft. Forza Horizon 5 accounted for the vast majority of all Xbox game sales on PS5 in 2025, dwarfing the next 10 ports combined.This massive haul means that the days of siloing off "live-service giants" are over, as the demand on rival hardware is simply too high to ignore.
Steam
Financial Realities Reshape the Gaming Landscape
While rumors occasionally surface about a return to hardware exclusivity, the financial reality tells a different story. As leaving millions of potential sales on the table no longer makes sense for the Xbox brand, especially as Microsoft shifts its focus toward a more unified gaming ecosystem, as per wccftech.
Virtuos also shared some behind-the-scenes details regarding their work on the game. The studio was responsible for roughly 90% of the photo-realistic vehicles found in the base game and its DLC expansions. Their contribution went beyond cars, as they also built extensive texture libraries, biome-specific visual details, and advanced damage animations that have helped the game remain a visual benchmark years after its initial 2021 launch.
The momentum isn't slowing down. All eyes are now on the upcoming Forza Horizon 6, which is slated for a May 19, 2026 release. Set in Japan, the next entry is already showing massive hype with over 511,000 pre-sales on Steam a month before launch, generating nearly $30 million. Given the success of its predecessor on PlayStation, many expect Forza Horizon 6 to eventually follow the same multi-platform path to even bigger financial wins.
Meanwhile, Microsoft's hardware future looks equally experimental. Reports on "Project Helix" suggest the next generation of Xbox might lean closer to a PC-like experience, potentially moving away from traditional custom GPUs in favor of a system that emulates the classic console experience while embracing the openness of Windows.
