Forza Horizon 6 has already tripled the series' peak player count on Steam

Following the Forza Horizon 6 early access release last week, the Japan-set open-world racing game has more than tripled the series' Steam player count record now that the standard edition is available. At the time of writing, Playground Games' new title has hit a peak of 273,148 players on Steam, with that number expected to climb even further throughout the day.

Forza Horizon 6 was released to players willing to buy the premium version on Friday, May 15, before releasing more widely on Tuesday, May 19. Previously, Forza Horizon 5 held the series record for the most concurrent players on Steam, hitting 81,096 at launch, while Forza Horizon 4 hit a peak of 75,689. The new game's current peak of 273,148, which comes via SteamDB, is more than triple the previous record, which is some going.

What's even more impressive is that Forza Horizon 6 is also a Game Pass game, meaning many players will have opted to play the game via the subscription service to save themselves a few dollars. The premium version didn't launch on the service, but the standard version is now available there at no extra cost to subscribers. I imagine there'll be even more people playing there than on Steam, so I think concurrent numbers will be up over half a million today.

There are a couple of reasons for the massive increase in players. The first is the Japan setting, which is one that fans have been asking for for a long time. As we saw from the likes of Assassin's Creed, it's a setting that resonates with a lot of videogame fans, and tends to lead to extra popularity for series that are typically set there. The excellent review scores (Aaron gave the game a 9/10 in our Forza Horizon 6 review) and fan sentiment since the premium edition launched will have helped as well.

You can pick up Forza Horizon 6 on Game Pass and Steam right now, and the player count will only go up over the next few days.