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In the midst of what's been a challenging week in Xbox land to say the least, we've noticed the folks over at Alinea Analytics reporting that Forza Horizon 6 appears to be the "top new game of the year by Steam revenue".
We already knew that FH6 was doing well both in terms of sales and reviews, but this really highlights it - the Steam version has apparently driven revenues of $197.7M, including $4M in DLC and around $2M from the VIP membership.
Compared to Forza Horizon 5's launch, this is said to be three pulling revenue three times faster:
"Forza Horizon 6 has ... driven revenues of $197.7M since launching under two months ago. It's the top new game of the year by Steam revenue. About $4M of that is DLC, including almost $2M from the VIP Membership (double event cash and other perks). Launch-aligned, Forza Horizon 6 is pulling revenue three times faster than 2021’s Forza Horizon 5 did. Horizon 6 is at 3.5M copies sold on Steam now."
Steam is obviously an extremely competitive marketplace these days, so it's quite an achievement for Xbox and Playground Games to be in the #1 spot here - especially considering they're above the likes of Resident Evil Requiem and Crimson Desert in the list.
Let's not forget that Xbox publishes Forza Horizon 6 on the Xbox PC app as well. Most people on there are presumably accessing it through Game Pass or Xbox Play Anywhere, but it'll still have generated plenty of sales. For what it's worth, Alinea estimated last month that 6.4 million copies of Forza Horizon 6 had been sold across all platforms and marketplaces, so just over half of them appear to have come via Steam, while the rest will have come from the Xbox Store across consoles and PC.
It was also suggested at the time that around six million extra people had been playing it via Game Pass.
In the midst of all this talk about layoffs, we've yet to hear anything about Playground Games, and we're assuming it's due to both the success of Forza Horizon 6 and the highly-anticipated release of Fable. Playground undoubtedly did a great job with FH6, and it seems Xbox is reaping the rewards for it in a big way.