Forza Horizon makes more money than its competitors combined, Playground Games co-founder says

Forza Horizon may be the most successful racing game series of all time, at least according to the co-founder responsible for the team making the games.

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For years, the Forza racing franchise was a crown jewel in Xbox's first-party exclusivity lineup. That changed when Microsoft decided to break exclusivity and offer key games on competing platforms. Forza Horizon 5 crossed over to PlayStation 5 in late April and helped Microsoft once again take over Sony's PlayStation Store charts.

Interestingly enough, the Forza Horizon franchise was apparently the top dog among its competitors--even before releasing on PlayStation. In a recent interview with Games Industry.biz, Playground Games (the studio responsible for Forza games) co-founder Gavin Raeburn said that Forza Horizon didn't just beat other racing games--it made more money than all of them combined.

"If you look at the revenue earning of that game now, it beats Gran Turismo, F1, Need For Speed and The Crew put together. That's before Horizon went over to PlayStation. That's massive. I think what that's done to the market though--all the other racing developers are now copying a lot of that Horizon formula.

"So the market is successful if you're an open world game with cars, but all these racing [developers] are delivering one type of game. That's the opportunity for us to do something that is very different and disruptive in the racing market."

It's unclear if Raeburn's comment was just an off-hand remark or if Forza Horizon is actually the top revenue-generating racing game in this way.

Forza Horizon is clearly a huge success for Microsoft, though, with 10 million players jumping into Forza Horizon 5 in its first week of availability. The game was also the best-selling title of April in the United States, as per Circana.

In 2023, Microsoft announced that it had 10 separate video games that had each achieved over 10 million users. Forza Horizon 5 was one of these games.