Forza Horizon may never be Xbox exclusive again as FH5 hits impressive sales on PS5

Developer Virtuos inadvertently highlights why Forza Horizon probably won't ever return to Xbox as an exclusive series.

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In 2024, Microsoft broke exclusivity, and a year later the company saw its biggest cross-platform success with Forza Horizon 5. While official numbers are light, analyst firm Alinea Analytics estimated that FH5 had sold 5 million copies on PS5 in a triple-five news headline. Now it looks like these numbers could be legit, or at the very least Virtuos, the game developer who helped with the PS5 port, is using Alinea's figures to highlight the game's cross-platform success.

"Forza Horizon 5 was one of the best-selling titles on PlayStation 5 in 2025, surpassing 5 million copies sold on the platform and earning widespread acclaim with a 92 Metacritic score. Praised for its stunning visuals, immersive open-world environments, and finely tuned gameplay mechanics, the game set a new benchmark in the racing genre," the developer writes on its website.

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Xbox has been an enigmatic company for years; ever since Microsoft stopped sharing console sales figures, the company has been extremely selective in what details and metrics that it reveals in its earnings reports, now giving out percentages that allow us to indirectly calculate per-quarter segment revenue.

But that only tells us so much, and there are other ways to infer Xbox's success, especially with where its software sits on competing storefronts like the PS Store.

By virtue of having so many game development studios and publishers, all of which will release multiple versions of a single title upon launch, Microsoft typically floods the digital sales charts and will have strong presences across three major tracking points: best-selling games by gross revenue, top downloads, and most pre-ordered games. In the latter category, Microsoft took over the PS Store's pre-order charts because it had four separate versions of Diablo IV for sale on the pre-order charts.

New Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has said that Microsoft will "reevaluate" its approach to exclusivity, indicating that the firm is thinking about going back to some sort of Xbox game exclusivity, but based on these figures, Forza Horizon probably won't be one of them.

That being said, Forza Horizon 6 will launch first on Xbox consoles and PC, with a PS5 launch later in the year. This could end up costing Microsoft big as competition is heating up in the latter half of the year with games like GTA 6, Call of Duty, and even Fable on the horizon, and we may see FH6 slip to early 2027 on PS5 in a bid to capture sales in a historically slower, less-competitive period.