Nearly four years since blockbuster racing hit Forza Horizon 5 sped onto Xbox and PC, the game’s PlayStation 5 port has become the Sony system’s top-selling game of 2025.
According to new data from Alinea Analytics, the PS5 port has moved more than 3 million units, narrowly eking past popular RPG Monster Hunter: World‘s 2.9 million copies sold. The four-year-old game has also passed the performance of other new hits like Ubisoft’s big-budget Assassin’s Creed Shadows (2 million), PvE souls-like Elden Ring Nightreign (1.4 million), and indie darling Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (1.3 million).
The analytics firm’s newsletter, The Alinea Insight, confirms the group tracked sales between January 1, 2025, and July 21, 2025.
Forza Horizon 5 was ported to PS5 on April 29, 2025, making it the first and only mainline game in the Forza franchise to be released on a PlayStation console. The revolutionary racing IP has been a consistent triumph throughout its 20-year tenure. Forza entered the scene in 2005 with the flagship Motorsport game, and its continued commercial success eventually beget the first Horizon spinoff in 2012. Horizon 5 sits alongside 2018’s Forza Horizon 4 as the franchise’s highest-rated releases.
Forza Horizon 5 sold 2 million copies less than one month after it hit PlayStation 5 consoles (25 days, to be exact). Comparatively, PlayStation’s 2024 family-friendly platformer and Game of the Year, Astro Bot, reached the same milestone after about three months. Kojima Productions’ cerebral walking sim, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, moved 1 million copies in the 25 days following its June release.
Alinea’s report cites three potential reasons for the Microsoft gaming division’s apparent shift toward third-party games — “revenue, stagnating subscriptions, and losing the console war.” The report explains that, as Xbox Game Pass subscriber counts level out, the brand must incentivize additional consumers. Additionally, publishers are “struggling to sell games on Xbox versus PS5,” a shift Alinea says is likely attributed to waning return-on-investment for third-party publishers.
Frankly, recent headlines haven’t painted the Xbox parent company as a reliable platform for players or publishers. As the brand publicly drops thousands of human employees for the shareholder-pleasing promise of generative AI, cancels long-awaited projects, and closes small studios, some critics fear Xbox is self-cannibalizing for the sake of unsustainable, short-term profit.
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A lifelong gamer raised on classic titles like Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, and Croc, Stephanie brings her expertise of gaming and pop culture to deliver unique, refreshing views on the world of video games, complete with references to absurd and obscure media.
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