Forza Horizon 6 explodes on Steam even before it's officially out

Steam is abuzz this week with a couple of long-anticipated launches, but in Forza Horizon 6’s case, at least, the game isn’t even out for what will be most of its players. The anticipated sequel in the open-world driving game series doesn’t officially launch until May 19, but owners of its most expensive version - the Premium Edition - can play it right now.

That version of the game includes more than just a few days of early access, of course, but you’d think the $120 price tag would’ve only been palatable to a small group of players. Not the case with this game.

Forza Horizon 6, which has spent 16 weeks in Steam’s global top sellers list, currently occupies the number two spot, having jumped up three spots this week in anticipation of the launch. The game has also naturally been popular with players, so popular in fact that it has already overtaken the player counts of all other Horizon games on the platform.

At the time of writing, the game has peaked at 128,157 concurrent players on Steam alone (via SteamDB). The figure has already climbed several times during the writing of this story, so you can only imagine how much higher it’s going to get deeper into the weekend.

All of that, of course, days before the official launch on Tuesday, when, theoretically, the majority of the game’s audience will be able to start playing. In just a few short hours, Horizon 6 has already gone well above Forza Horizon 5’s peak concurrent of 81,096, as well as Forza Horizon 4’s peak 75,689 players.

Image credit: Playground Games, Xbox Game Studios

Steam is the only platform that publishes player numbers, of course, but it’s easy to see how similar the enthusiasm is going to be on Xbox. Though the game is not yet part of the Game Pass line-up, those who don’t want to wait could buy the Premium Edition Upgrade to get the included content, and play it right now.

Game Pass, and Xbox / Windows Store numbers don’t factor into Steam’s, which is another thing to consider when viewing the numbers holistically. Indeed, given how successful Forza Horizon 5 has been on PlayStation 5, Horizon 6’s upcoming release on Sony's console is bound to be even bigger.

Forza Horizon 5 has been off to a similarly flying start in the first few days of its own advanced access launch, so it’s obviously not surprising to see Horizon 6 do better there. In case you missed it, check out our review of Forza Horizon 6. In short, we really liked it, even if we expected more.