Forza Horizon 6 breaks player records on PC, premium edition copies achieve platinum sales

Microsoft has broken new ground on Steam as Forza Horizon 6 becomes the most popular racing game ever on the platform.

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Forza Horizon 6 shows signs of being gaming's latest big hit as the racing sim achieves hundreds of thousands of players on Steam on launch day. New data from SteamDB shows that FH6 managed to hit over 273K players in the last 24 hours, setting a new all-time peak player count not only for Forza Horizon games, but racing games as a genre on Steam itself.

Other details indicate that Forza Horizon 6 may have already made over $140 million in revenue from its premium version alone, dwarfing our own analysis of the game's early advanced access sales on Steam. This could show that consumers are now more price tolerant for higher-end experiences, and that Microsoft's penchant towards FOMO-oriented early access is also working out quite well, as Forza Horizon 6's $120 premium edition is roughly equivalent of two full-priced games from the previous console generation.

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A screenshot of Forza Horizon 6's leaderboards was shared before the base version of the game launched, giving an idea of how many people may have paid for the $120 premium edition.

The image showed approximately 1,191,886 players had jumped into FH6, and while specifics around these numbers remain unclear, a quick bit of math shows that Xbox could have pulled in over $143 million in revenue from premium edition sales alone.

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Xbox's communications teams have yet to reveal any kind of sales milestones for Forza Horizon 6, but those might be coming in the next few days. The new game could also get a major boost from its impending release on PlayStation 5--the previous game became a best-seller on the platform, and the franchise as a whole is said to be the best-earning racing franchise on the planet, making more than its competitors combined.