Forza Horizon 6 Has Earned an Estimated $579 Million, and It Has Not Even Reached PS5 Yet

Featured image: official key art via Playground Games / forza.net

Microsoft has plenty of questions to answer about the future of Xbox hardware, but its racing game is not one of them. According to a new report from Alinea Analytics, Forza Horizon 6 has sold an estimated 8.8 million copies and generated $579.2 million in revenue since launching in May. That makes it the biggest first-party game of 2026 from either Microsoft or Sony, and it has done it without a single PlayStation 5 sale.

The PS5 version is now dated for January 2027, which sets up an interesting race against Gran Turismo 7. Here is what the numbers say, where the money is coming from, and why the Steam versus Xbox split is more interesting than it first looks.

What the Alinea report actually says

Alinea Analytics, through analyst Rhys Elliott, tracks sales across Xbox, Steam and PlayStation storefronts. Its October 14 update puts Forza Horizon 6 at 8.8 million units and $579.2 million, which is about 1.4 million more copies and roughly $45 million more than the September snapshot of 7.4 million units and $534.3 million. For a game that is five months old, that is still a healthy trickle.

It is worth being clear about what these numbers are. They are proprietary estimates of gross revenue, not audited results and not profit. Microsoft has not confirmed them, so treat them as a well-informed ballpark rather than a hard fact. As Wccftech’s write-up points out, the gap to the rest of the field is large enough that the exact decimal hardly matters.

How far ahead is it?

Very far. Marvel’s Wolverine sits in second place with around $193 million, and MLB The Show 26 is right behind it at about $192.7 million. Forza Horizon 6 earns roughly three times what either of them does. Further down the first-party chart, the numbers get a lot smaller.

A few of those other entries tell their own stories. Wolverine has sold around 2.5 million copies in under a month and still has strong user reviews on the PlayStation Store, a gap between critics and players we covered in our look at Marvel’s Wolverine launching with Insomniac’s lowest score in a decade. Gears of War: E-Day has done $42.1 million on 311,000 copies in its first couple of weeks, with about three quarters of that coming from Xbox, which fits the reception we described in our Gears of War: E-Day review roundup.

Xbox makes more money, Steam sells more copies

This is the most interesting detail in the whole report. By the end of September, Steam had moved roughly 3.4 million paid copies of Forza Horizon 6, against about 4 million on Xbox platforms. Yet the Xbox ecosystem accounts for 56.7% of total revenue, and Steam for 43.3%. More copies on PC, less money. Why?

Two things are going on. Steam uses regional pricing, so a copy sold in a lower-income market brings in far less than a full-price US sale. And on the Xbox side, Game Pass changes the math. Alinea estimates that more than 10 million people played the game through Game Pass, and about 1.3 million of them paid for the Premium upgrade, which accounts for roughly $82 million in extra revenue.

A launch that kept its legs

The early numbers were already huge. The game launched on May 19, 2026 on Xbox Series X|S and PC, with Premium Edition owners getting in four days earlier. On Steam it hit an all-time peak of 284,139 concurrent players on May 21, far above the roughly 80,000 that Forza Horizon 5 reached. Playground Games said more than six million people had played within the first week, and Alinea logged close to 5 million first-week copies sold.

Critics were on board too, with most reports putting the Metacritic score in the low 90s. The series’ first trip to Japan, built around Tokyo expressway culture, clearly landed with players. And because Microsoft redirected resources toward it, it arrived as the one big first-party racing game of the year.

The PS5 launch is the real test

Playground Games confirmed on October 8 that Forza Horizon 6 arrives on PlayStation 5 on January 26, 2027, alongside the first Premium Expansion and a free update. Premium Edition owners get early access starting January 21. If the Xbox and PC audience has done this much, the PlayStation audience, which is the largest console base, has barely been touched.

The benchmark to beat is Gran Turismo 7, estimated at about $834 million in lifetime revenue. Forza Horizon 6 needs roughly another $255 million to pass it, which looks very achievable with a PS5 release and the holiday season in between. Catching Forza Horizon 5, which topped $1 billion, will take longer, but Wccftech expects the newer game to get there eventually.

What this says about Xbox’s strategy

It is a quiet vindication of Microsoft’s multiplatform approach. A few weeks ago the company was explaining that it had no exclusive GTA 6 streaming deal, and Xbox hardware sales have been under real pressure. Meanwhile its software is doing the heavy lifting on Steam and, soon, on PlayStation. The Game Pass upgrade numbers also suggest that a subscription and big-budget sales can live side by side.

My take: the number to watch is not the $579 million, it is how much the PS5 version adds in its first month. If Forza Horizon 6 passes Gran Turismo 7 on Sony’s own platform within a year, expect a lot more Xbox games to follow it there. Just remember these are estimates until Microsoft says otherwise.

Sources: Wccftech, Windows Report, Tech Times, Forza official site, Traxion.

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