Hold onto your steering wheels, because Forza Horizon 6 is pulling off a surprisingly spicy speedrun of the sales charts. According to Pure Xbox, Playground Games' new open-world racer is already racking up serious traction on PC - and we're not even out of early access yet.
Now here's the wild part: Forza Horizon 6 is a day-one Game Pass title. That means Xbox and PC subscribers can just... play it. For free. As part of their subscription. Yet people are still opening their wallets and buying the thing outright, which is either a testament to the game's pulling power or proof that gamers have simply evolved beyond rational financial decision-making.
A quick glance at SteamDB - the trusty database that tracks player counts and sales figures for PC titles - tells a pretty compelling story even at this early stage. The numbers are strong enough that Pure Xbox flagged them as noteworthy, which in the current climate of "Games as a Service struggling to keep the lights on" is genuinely refreshing to see.
It does raise a delicious question though: is the early access premium worth it? Paying extra to jump into a game a few days early is basically a tax on impatience - a mechanic gaming has perfected almost as an art form at this point. But if the player counts are anything to go by, plenty of folks decided that yes, waiting is for NPCs.
Playground Games has been on a serious win streak with the Horizon series, and it looks like FH6 is not planning to break that combo chain anytime soon. With Game Pass acting as a massive safety net AND standalone sales still performing well, Microsoft might be quietly doing a victory lap in Redmond right now.
Whether this momentum holds post-launch will be the real test - but for now, the speedometer is pointing firmly in the right direction.
