$140M in Two Days, and Forza Horizon 6 Isn't Out Yet

One hundred and twenty dollars. That's what over a million players paid to access Forza Horizon 6 before its official launch date. Not for a collector's edition with a steelbook and a model car. Not for lifetime DLC access. Just to play the game a few days early. And collectively, they handed Microsoft and Playground Games more than $140 million in a single weekend, according to figures reported by Insider Gaming.

I covered the player count numbers a few days ago when Forza Horizon 6 topped one million players during early access, and even then the scale was hard to ignore. The concurrent player peak has since climbed past 181,000, more than doubling Forza Horizon 5's full launch numbers. But the revenue figure puts the whole thing in a different light. This isn't just a popular racing game having a good opening. It's a case study in how much money publishers can extract before a product is even technically available.

The $120 Question

Let me be clear about what I think: Forza Horizon 6 is, by most accounts, an excellent game. It earned a 92 on Metacritic, making it the best-reviewed game of 2026 so far, sitting above Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata. Destructoid scored it a 9, praising the Japanese setting in particular. The game looks gorgeous, runs well, and delivers on what the series has always promised. None of that is in dispute.

What I find harder to stomach is the normalisation of $120 early access as a standard practice for AAA releases. We've watched this model spread across the industry over the past few years, and Forza Horizon 6's staggering opening weekend is going to accelerate it. Every publisher executive on the planet is looking at that $140 million figure right now and thinking about how to replicate it. The message the market just sent is unambiguous: charge more, gate access behind a premium tier, and players will pay.

And honestly, I get why people paid. If you're a Forza fan and all your friends are playing on Friday, the pressure to join them rather than wait until the following week is real. That's not a flaw in the players. It's a pricing strategy designed to exploit exactly that impulse. The "early access" framing makes it sound like a bonus, but flip it around and what you're really looking at is a delayed standard launch dressed up as a perk for premium buyers.

Not Everyone's Sold

The critical reception hasn't been perfectly mirrored by players, either. On Steam, Forza Horizon 6 currently sits at 78 percent positive reviews, landing in the "mostly positive" bracket. English-language reviews push that to around 85 percent, with Simplified Chinese reviews dragging the overall score down into mixed territory. That gap between a 92 Metacritic average and a 78 percent Steam rating is, even if some of the negative appears region-specific.

Still, 78 percent positive for a game that costs $120 to access right now isn't exactly a ringing endorsement from the people actually playing it. A 92 from critics and a lukewarm reception from paying customers suggests there's friction somewhere, whether that's performance issues in certain regions, missing features, or just the sour taste of the price tag itself.

The Japan setting was always going to be a magnet. Playground Games knew it, Microsoft knew it, and the player numbers confirm it. Forza Horizon has been one of the most consistently excellent series in gaming for over a decade, and moving the open world to Japan was the single most requested change the community had been asking for. Delivering on that promise while also charging a premium for early entry is a very calculated move.

What sticks with me is the precedent. $140 million before the game is officially available to everyone. That number will be cited in earnings calls, investor presentations, and internal strategy meetings at every major publisher for years. It validates the tiered launch model completely. Why would any company look at this result and decide to launch a game at one price, on one date, for everyone? The financial incentive to stratify access is now backed by nine figures of proof.

Forza Horizon 6's standard edition launches later this week for players who didn't opt into the premium tier. Microsoft hasn't disclosed how many of the one million-plus early access players came through Game Pass Ultimate versus direct purchases at $120, a distinction that would significantly change how we read that $140 million figure.