FH4 seems more active than 5 to me. Eliminator, Forzathon live, etc, all have a bunch of people playing.
Out of all the FH I’ve played, I’d still play 5, but that really comes down to 1 thing: the physics.
If you took the physics of 5 and put it in 3, I’d go back and play that game.
It’s tough for me to go back and play it now though. Car weight and suspension are so much more nebulous, there are really only 3 surfaces in the game as far as the physics are concerned (tarmac, not tarmac, and water), and shifting in all cars is way too quick.
FH3 has other issues too, like how you can’t change brightness with HDR on and the only workaround is to turn off HDR on your entire system. The car list pales in comparison to 5 (though there are a few nice surprises).
But in terms of gameplay design and structure, it blows FH5 out of the water. It has an actual single player endgame with custom championships. Online was far more vibrant and interactive, made all the better by the fact that it wasn’t passively forced on everyone. It had a car meet mode.
If PGGs had chosen to iterate on FH3 I’d be singing their praises to this day, and scoffing at the notion that older titles were better, but instead they insist on perpetually reinventing the wheel, purposefully removing features from one iteration to the next. It’s massively frustrating.
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On Xbox of all the people who played FH5, only just over 10% of players actually progress to the HOF.
Less than 6% of all players have won an open event. 
Lots of people tune in… but do they stay tuned in?
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I honestly believe that the developers changing the lively Horizon Life lobbies to dead lobbies, and Forzathon Live to the new Horizon Arcade is enough to put this game beneath, maybe even significantly beneath FH4 if you compare their primes (1 year since release). They tried to fix something that was 0% broken and PGG won’t recover from that brutal decision unless they changed it back but 99% chance they don’t. The game seems dead and inactive due to these 2 bewildering changes alone (Horizon Life and Forzathon Live).
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And what percentage of those are actively still playing?
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I’ve noticed this every time I get an achievement. Even the first achievement you get in the HW expansion was single digit percentage, if I recall. As in, like, the achievement just for starting the expansion.
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Even the very first achievement we’ll all get is baffling, 28.37% of the game’s total players don’t have it.
I know the number will have increased by now but let’s do the maths as if it’s from when they made their 20 million players boast.
That’s 5.674 million players who didn’t even bother to make it to the festival from the intro.
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So, 5.674 million players were smart enough to stop the car, reach into an alternate dimension for an anti-air missile launcher, and demand Rami pick them up and take them back home, or risk being shot down.
That’s my headcanon and I’m running with it.
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Forzathon Live absolutely needed the changes it got. The challenges never scaled to the number of participants, so if you had too few participants (or worse, too many people simply mooching off of the few actually trying), you were straight out of luck for that session. Making them completable, even solo, takes the sting out of the fact that they took that technically-optional pain in the rear and made it required for this game.
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There’s nothing baffling about the achievements at all. You get them as you progress through the game. You don’t get the option to refuse them or bypass them. So the true numbers of people who play the game is directly reflected in the numbers within the achievements.
The game did have 20 million “trys”. But it clearly doesn’t have 20 million players. Actually active players are far fewer than the percentage of players who have made the HoF.
I said baffling because I don’t get how anyone could try a game out for such a short amount of time they don’t even finish it’s introduction, I don’t know about many things but achievements are one of them.
All I can think of is the GP Quests which sometimes just ask you to boot games up to complete them for 25 reward pts, with cloud gaming it’s a 30 second load up, quit out job.
And whenever you see me say 20 million players that’s me holding PG to their own brag, not me actually believing there is 20 million people playing the game.
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This guy is asking the real questions.
Granted, some of the early game stuff has increased over time, maybe some of them came back at some point to play a little…
If you look at how the “single player” campaign progresses, the percentage of players that completed them drops drastically. The completion of outposts is where you see drops to roughly 25%.
That part of baffling I can understand your side. I would guess it’s just kids running rampant through gamepass just looking for something to do. Whatever it is, it gives marketing big numbers and that is all they care about. So marketing says there are 20 million players. That’s their story and they’re sticking to it.
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I 100% agree with you, its just sad. I love the Forza franchise but since forza horizon 4 its the “Game As A Service” and “Gamepass” are destroying the games.
Its ok on free to play game, not in a game that you pay for. I the shores they make you do is not fun.
I have all my Forza games on physical discs and im never going to subscribe to any gamepass.
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The game’s success is mostly caused by the fact arcade racing is such a stagnant genre. The lack of innovation isn’t an accident. Forza, as a franchise, has always been reactive, not proactive. I think the only major innovation Forza has introduced was the PI system. Everything else is literally copied from rival franchises. Rewind for example was copied from GRID.
So when I see Forza partnering with Donut Media, which had a partnership with the now defunct Dirt 5, I can’t help but laugh a little. If it wasn’t enough that Forza Horizon itself is basically Burnout Paradise + Test Drive Unlimited on the Forza engine, every major partnership Forza has gone for in its history, apart from Barrett-Jackson, was once a partner of a direct competitor: Top Gear and Hospital Records (Gran Turismo), Hoonigan (NFS), and now Donut Media (Dirt).
The team handling Forza Horizon right now has the benefit of competition that tries to copy Forza’s success, but eventually someone will come up with something new, or people will simply get bored of what is essentially the same game with new cars. A development approach that makes sense in a track racer like Forza Motorsport, not in a high profile open world AAA title like Forza Horizon.
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Personally, I love FH5 for what it is, and FH4 likewise. FM7 got old to me fast. I tried FH2 when it was featured on Gold but kept experiencing crashes.
I feel there was more detail in horizon 2 like it really focused on the cars more than the background lol
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