We all know at this point that Forza Horizon 5 has been a huge success for Xbox on PS5, but this perhaps puts it into perspective a little more – the sales for that game on Sony’s console have almost overtaken the 2024 Game of the Year.
That game was Astro Bot, at least according to The Game Awards and our sister site Push Square – while Metacritic also had it in the joint-top spot with an incredible average score of 94. It’s a game that sold well and deservedly so, but it just shows the power of Forza Horizon 5 that it’s almost overtaken that game’s sales on PS5 after three months.
This is according to Alinea Analytics, which says the following about Horizon 5’s sales in June:
“Microsoft’s Forza Horizon 5 came in at #5 with 555 K copies sold (that’s A LOT of fives), bringing its PlayStation total to just under 2.9 million. Much of the extra copies sold were driven by a timely discount to $48 that ran until June 11. It’s the first Xbox-published port to hit that milestone on Sony hardware, and it’s done so in under three months.
Forza’s now almost surpassed PS5 sales of Astro Bot, PlayStation’s premier premium first-party launch, which picked up game of the year at The Game Awards last year.”
As you can see, Forza Horizon 5 isn’t quite at the 3 million mark just yet, but it’s going to get there this month – and that’s an amazing achievement for the game, as well as a clear sign to Microsoft that it should keep publishing major Xbox titles on PlayStation. The customers have shown up for it, justifying the third-party strategy.
The big question now is what’s going to happen when Sony does the same for Xbox. Helldivers 2 is coming to Xbox Series X and Series S in August, and if the sales are anything like this, it surely won’t mean the end of PlayStation “exclusives” making their way to Microsoft’s consoles. If it flops though, we may never see anything like it again.