Forza Horizon 6 isn't even out yet — at least, not in the way Microsoft sells it to most players — and it has already done something no Horizon title has managed before: snap the franchise's all-time Steam concurrent player record clean in half and walk past it before the base game has finished installing.
According to SteamDB tracking, the Japan-set racer hit a peak of 172,093 concurrent Steam players during its $120 Premium Edition advanced access window, with some trackers logging the high-water mark as 178,009. Either figure is more than double Forza Horizon 5's all-time peak of 81,096, set across years of seasonal updates, free Game Pass weekends, and the Hot Wheels expansion. Premium has done that in roughly 72 hours.
And the wild part isn't the raw number — it's the gate the number cleared. To be inside Forza Horizon 6 right now, on Steam, you had to pony up for either the $99.99 Premium Edition or the $59.99 Premium Upgrade if you already owned the base game. That's a $60-to-$120 ticket on a Microsoft-published title that will, in 24 hours, be inside Xbox Game Pass for $11.99 per month. The 172K who paid up are essentially the most committed Horizon audience in the world, willing to pay a four-day surcharge to drive ahead of the May 19 worldwide launch.
The advanced access window opened at 5 a.m. PT on May 15, four days before the worldwide drop, with the headline numbers landing the same afternoon. By Friday night, Forza Horizon 6 had overtaken Forza Horizon 5's lifetime peak; by Saturday morning, it had doubled it; and by Sunday, the trajectory was still climbing toward the next wave of Game Pass and base-game buyers who pile in on May 19.
Playground Games' decision to set Horizon 6 in Japan is paying off in ways that go beyond Tokyo neon. The map sprawls from the C1 expressway's downtown ribbons all the way up to the snowy peaks of Mount Bandai and Mount Haruna, with mountain passes inspired by real-world touge routes wedged between them. It's a more vertical map than Mexico, more dense than Britain, and built around the idea that anywhere you point a car, you can run it. Critics have already noticed: the Metacritic average for the Xbox Series X|S build sits at 92, making it the best-reviewed game of 2026 so far and the sixth consecutive Forza Horizon mainline release to clear 90.
The advanced access numbers also push back, hard, on a story that had been gathering steam ahead of launch. When the review embargo lifted four days before early access and only five days before the worldwide drop, some readers framed it as a PR sequence designed to bury the reviews. The early-access concurrency board has now stamped out that read; the people who paid the premium are openly broadcasting how much of the game they're playing.
What happens at the May 19 worldwide launch is the more interesting question. The base game opens up on Steam, the Xbox Store, and Xbox Game Pass on Console, PC, and Cloud, all the same morning. Microsoft has not pushed a Forza title day-one onto Game Pass with a launch this large before; Horizon 6 will be there from minute one, which means a flood of players who paid nothing extra and only need the $11.99 sub to enter. The next 24 hours on the SteamDB chart and the Xbox concurrent figure will likely tell us where the ceiling actually is. Right now, Premium has lifted it to a place no Horizon game has ever been.
Forza Horizon 6 launches worldwide on May 19, 2026, on Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC, Steam, and the Microsoft Store, with day-one inclusion in Xbox Game Pass. A PlayStation 5 version is confirmed for later in 2026.
