Playground Games founder claims Forza has made more money than GT, NFS and F1 combined

Though not the face of the Xbox brand, the Forza series is certainly one of Microsoft’s biggest – with Forza Horizon 5 alone seeing over 45 million players. According to the former co-founder of Playground Games, Forza has made more revenue than “Gran Turismo, F1, Need For Speed and The Crew put together.”

In an interview with Gamesindustry.biz, discussing their latest creative endeavour with Lighthouse Games, the former co-founder and studio head of Playground Games – Gavin Raeburn – offered an interesting perspective on the success of the Forza Horizon series, claiming:

“The racing market now is very healthy, it's very good, it's doing well. But if you look at the market, you look at Horizon…the number of people I've spoken to who’ve played Horizon who would say, ‘I didn't think I like racing games, but I love Horizon' – it's been hugely successful.”

According to Raeburn, “If you look at the revenue earning of that game now, it beats Gran Turismo, F1, Need For Speed and The Crew put together. That's before Horizon went over to PlayStation. That's massive. I think what that’s done to the market, though, [is] all the other racing developers are now copying a lot of that Horizon formula.”

While the former head of Playground Games would certainly have greater access to the sales and revenue of the Forza series (and maybe even its contemporaries), it is left unclear as to how this was calculated – especially with a majority of the 45 million players likely having done so through Game Pass.

Regardless, there’s no denying that Forza Horizon is a massive series by this point. It will be interesting to see how the inevitable Forza Horizon 6 performs.

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KitGuru says: What do you think of these claims? What’s your favourite current-gen racing game? Does it make sense to compare sim-racers and arcadey open-world racers? Let us know your thoughts down below.

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