Alinea Analytics, a third-party statistics company, predicts that "Forza Horizon 6" will once again bring great success to the series. On the PC Steam platform alone, pre-sale sales exceeded 500,000, and the number of wishlists exceeded 3 million. After factoring in various editions and regional pricing, revenue is approaching $30 million.
In addition, the company also estimates that sales of "Forza Horizon 6" in the first 24 hours on the PC Steam platform will reach 2 million.
"Forza Horizon 6", which will be released next month, is undoubtedly the most anticipated game in the history of the series. The reasons are as follows:
The game is set in Japan, something fans have been waiting for since the Xbox 360 days
The gap between Forza Horizon 5 and Forza Horizon 6 is the longest in the sub-series' history, so players' thirst has been through the roof
"Forza Horizon 6" is also the first work in the series to be developed exclusively for the Xbox Series X/S console, allowing the development team to further tap into the performance of the Forza Tech engine.
"Forza Horizon" has a larger brand, stronger influence, and covers more platforms and regions.
"Forza Horizon 6" marketing strategy translated into real sales on Steam
After the map was revealed on April 8, the media preview ban was lifted, and the first real-player game was launched, the daily sales increase of "Forza Horizon 6" on Steam soared significantly.
This growth momentum has continued until its greatest peak - on April 13, "Forza Horizon 6" developer Playground Games announced the game's achievement list. The response to this announcement has been quite good among the player community. First of all, the new game completely cancels the troublesome "Eliminator" battle royale-related achievement requirements in the previous game.
Players are also quite excited about this, because the route to 100% full achievement seems to be more of a single-player experience, less dependent on uncertain online battles, and also greatly strengthens the importance of exploration gameplay.
In addition, the achievement list also makes many players look forward to the return of the Wristbands system and the addition of a large number of Japanese-specific content.
On April 13, "Forza Horizon 6" sold 22,000 copies in a single day on Steam, setting a record since the game launched 50,000 copies on the day it was pre-ordered.
The second largest market in China
The U.S. remains the largest market for Forza games across all platforms. But changes in the market landscape since the launch of Forza Horizon 5 have given its upcoming sequel a larger potential market upon release.
Currently, China is the country with the second largest number of Steam players for Forza Horizon 5, only slightly behind the United States. Chinese players have a huge passion for Japanese car culture, and the Chinese Steam community has grown exponentially over the past five years. Forza Horizon 6 is expected to be a huge success in the Chinese market.
at present,China is the market with the second largest number of wishlists for Forza Horizon 6. Japanese players currently account for about 6% of the total number of Steam wishlists.This ratio is much higher than any previous work in the series. Although PC games have developed rapidly in Japan since the epidemic, for racing games in the Japanese market, the console platform is still the real core of competition.
Obviously, the setting set in Japan is of great significance to local Japanese players and racing game enthusiasts (just like when the series chose the British stage, it also made a large number of players very excited).
There is also a very critical factor, that is, the JDM (Japanese Domestic Market) car culture has extremely huge influence on a global scale. Players around the world have been looking forward to this stage for more than ten years, and their voices have always been very high.
Considering that Xbox is almost negligible in the Japanese console market, and the Switch 2 version has not yet been announced, the PS5 version of "Horizon 6" has become the only realistic path to cover Japanese console users and achieve commercial conversion. After all, this is a work with Japan as its core stage.