FH5 managed to attract 15M players now. That is really impressive for a racing game. Looks to me that the FH5 formula is working despite all the problems.
Congratulations to PG/T10/MS. I hope they will continue doing what you are doing because it’s obvious that it’s working.
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I think there are far more people who like the game than don’t, its just that those who don’t like spend more time on the forum whinging, whereas those who like it spend more time actually playing it.
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You mean that the guy who constantly criticized FH4 spending 1900h on the same game and is currently constantly criticizing FH5 while playing for 500h already is an immature troll? How dare you! But you have a point. You might be right.
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This, 1000%.
Forza Horizon 5, has it’s problems, but there is a concentrated effort by four, or five individual posters who do nothing but post on this forum all day long to malign the game and anybody who dares express their enjoyment with it because they’re addicted to the negativity and shallow validation the get from the few “likes” their self-inflated posts receive. The irony is, I bet if we looked at their play time and Xbox Account achievements, they’d be some of the top players on FH5, and that not only makes them hypocrites, but immature trolls, too, regardless, of chronological age.
These people need to find a something more positive to do with their time. I’m serious. If they hate FH5 so much, they need to find a different game to play. Or better yet, go outside. Touch some grass as the new gamer meme states. Their constant criticism is not healthy even if it makes them feel “good” they’re voicing their so-called frustrations… Because that’s ALL they do. Ever. Not only this, but they keep restating the same things over and over and refuse to move on. They are literally evangelizing the definition of insanity.
Don’t get me wrong.
FH5 has some major problems at the current time.
I, for one, can’t stand how broken and blatantly unfair the Drivatar system is. However, while I’ve voiced my opinion on this numerous times, I don’t spend every waking moment on these forums constantly posting my frustration, anger or disappointment about it.
ManteoMax has stated Playground Games is aware of the issues with the Drivatars. Whether they fix them or not, remains to be seen. But at this point in both the Horizon, and Motorsport life cycles, I’ve become accustomed to working around them and still enjoying my time with the games. If I truly hated the games… like some of these forum dwellers claim they do… I would have done the mature thing, uninstalled it weeks ago and moved onto something that gives me real enjoyment because not only is my time valuable, but especially the time I choose to spend gaming when I could be doing something else.
I hope these posters who are dissatisfied with FH5, find a game that gives them real joy because I’d hate to be them, spending most of their free time farming negativity on an anonymous internet forum in vain attempt to be the franchises’ “saviors.”
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I wish these forums could be a more positive place. There is a LOT of great stuff in the game now, and a lot of fun to be had, but you can’t share a livery here or talk about how much fun it was to do a certain thing without someone hijacking your thread to say you’re a fanboy and the game is unplayable.
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HOF is a particpation trophy. When I last looked 10.41% have completed HOF, only 5.71% have won a single race.
So 15m players have clicked on FH5 for a quick look and only ~ 10% of those are sticking around enough to put a couple of hours a week into it to complete the HOF.
At least this explains the Trial…
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I think there a far more people that like and hate the game in equal measures.
Personally I do like the Forza Horizon games, especially “The Eliminator” (FH4 was better than FH5 tho’), but hate all the bugs, inefficient GUI navigation, options etc, the unpurged Cheaterboards (AKA Leaderboards), the too-long Forzathon challenges plus a whole host of other annoyances, yet I still paly every day. 
So something must be right.
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The ones “whinging” care way more about the game than those who don’t mate.
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That can’t be right. It takes a fair amount of playing the game to get to the HoF. And everyone knows it’s just so broken and unplayable!
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I fully agree, I bet the numbers are padded to impress the investors. From what I’ve seen online most players can’t even drive good enough to achieve the HoF.
No it just means you don’t understand what those figures mean.
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I’m sure someone here has a higher understanding of those numbers. But you see. Ordinary people just see millions of user playing the game. If they played the first minute or the entire game change little. The numbers are there and will only go up. A bad product don’t attract customers anyway.
In the past, this may have been true when you had to pay a not-insignificant amount of money to play the game…however, Game Pass changes things. Someone may see it on Game Pass, think it looks interesting, install it and then decide it’s a bad product and uninstall it again…it will show as another player having played whether it was for 5 minutes or 5 weeks. A lot of players could be playing till they get into the HOF, realise it changes little beyond access to the Trial and then give up.
I think, ultimately, numbers are meaningless without some context: Microsoft made a big hoo-ha about the 10 Million players reached but didn’t elaborate on how many of those were still playing, how many were purchases versus Game Pass, how many of those were new GP subscribers (vs existing etc), how long did the average player play and so on.
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This one does.
I’m being facetious but only partly. A product isn’t necessarily only ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but there is plenty of ‘bad’ about this one. It attracts a lot of casual or curious interest, most of which evaporates quickly, even from many hardcore players in this particular iteration because there is so much bad about it that many of us have gone back to FH4.
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But the only thing to back up you claim is your personal opinion. My personal opinion differs. We are probably both right too. But you must realize that they are going to use and abuse that number for self promotion. It can only benefit them. That number is way more important for them than 10000 posts here. That number means money. They are a company that must sell successful products. If they fail the product change.
Now to put it shortly. Ask yourself. Are they going to follow a successful formula that attract masses and make tons of money in the process or are they going to listen to a smaller group who wants changes risking to lose a chunk of those casuals that bring money?
We can speculate that the next title is going to be fully next gen. 3 years from now an AAA Xbone title is hard to believe. The overall quality will improve. But we will still get the same basic formula with little changes. Because it works.
@Nursemorph the Game Pass excuse is becoming old now. Because you see everyone this days is trying to make use of some sort of subscription. From Xbox to Sony, EA and Ubisoft they are all going in the same direction. Because it obviously generate money. Or to put it simple. If GP is responsible for those numbers than it’s a success. And what matters more 1000 players that play a game for 10 minutes or 10 players who play a game for 1000 days? If you choose the second answer it only means that you will end up broke someday if you venture in the gaming business.
My argument was simply that numbers don’t mean anything with Game Pass when you can download games on a whim, play for 10 minutes, then uninstall it…only issue is if you have the bandwidth…I regularly download 100GB+ games for Game Pass Quests and, a lot of the time, I quit them before they have finished loading as the Quest was “Play” and then it gets uninstalled.
As to choosing the first versus second answer: Maybe…but then Playground’s model has always been to keep players playing long-term so that they buy the extra things like car packs etc…so choosing the first option would not be good for their business model either. There is no right or wrong answer: Statistics can be made to suit whatever argument is needed…you say the 15 Million proves that the game is a success, I argue that it just proves that 15 million people have at least loaded the game but does not indicate the quality of the game at all.
Would the game still be viewed as an excellent game if the figures showed that 13 million of those players have already quit playing for example?
What about if 10 million of those players were Game Pass subscribers but only 500,000 were new subscribers?
As I said, numbers without context are meaningless…I could go out tomorrow and spend £100s on the fastest PCIE M.2 SSD on the market…on the face of it, I’d have access to the best speeds possible…however, I would get nowhere near those numbers because my PC isn’t good enough. So, I could say “My drive has xxxx write and yyyy read speeds” but it would mean little.
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With cloud gaming you don’t even need to install anymore, making it even more convenient for trying a game out as long as it’s supported by it.
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Yes it would still be a success. Look at the most successful NFS MW 2005. That game can be finished in 7h easily. You can stretch that time to a week or a month it doesn’t change the fact that it sold 16M copies becoming the most successful in the series. You can’t obviously compare that to the FH5 sales since it’s on GP. So the only number we can compare the most successful NFSl game is FH5 player count. So you see time spent is irrelevant while the number is still useful. Ok I’m stretching it too far.
And also I wasn’t talking about the quality. We have proven times and times again that some think this is the best some that this is the worst game in the series. Which is true? But we can measure a success. Player count is a measure for success. Just like people who are watching a movie in the Theatre. You don’t count those who left early or did’t like the ending.
The players sure, they don’t care for the vast majority at least. But the press and the devs… I bet they care. Devs sure use tons of other data too.
But I agree. The guys from PG and T10 keep pushing with new content to keep the players engaged. Because they care.