Wanted to talk a little about Forza sales or 'players', and wasn't sure where to put it so i'll post it here. (Not sure if this is new thread worthy)
Kudosprime, a visual vehicle website database for all of the Forza games (GT, NFS, GTA too) actually has been tracking the number of players for Forza since the start of FM6. They do this through the introduction race leaderboards (through rivals) which I've seen many users quote before. But they've actually been taking these numbers at regular intervals and creating numerical datasets with them, which can be useful for analysis.
Of course these numbers are not indicative of sales, but are as close as we are gonna get until an Xbox PR statement (that'll probably be just MAU's or "players" in this case anyway). These numbers include people who have gameshared the game, people who have rented the game, people who have downloaded the game on the free weekend and probably a few others which of course do not equal a sale. Conversely, it doesn't include offline players or people who don't ever set a leaderboard time. Either way, it's not "sales data" its more "player data" or how many people have played our games. It's where they get the "11 million people have played a forza game" PR headliner from.
Anyway I thought it would be interesting to see how Forza Motorsport, the main franchise compared to Forza Horizon, the spin-off franchise.Firstly, lets take a look at FM6.
Kudosprime were kind enough to record both the Europe numbers (You can filter leaderboards by local region) and the total numbers in there data so we can see how much of Europe makes up the Forza player base. Immediately you can see three spikes in the gradient; one at launch, one at christmas and one around the beginning of september (due to the free weekend the game had).
What stands out to me is the long is the continual growth right up until FH3's launch and even past that. Bare in mind that Kudos aren't recording these leaderboard numbers down every couple of months, they're doing it way more frequently (as we'll see in the next graph). As of right now, the leaderboard total sits at 3,738,066 (with 273,365 in the Asia-Pacific region)
Now onto FH3's (the interesting one)
Kudos were nice enough to not only record a vast amount of data points for FH3, but plot it against FM6's numbers over the same time period (Forza 6's data is offset to match launch data)
Immediately you can see FH3's dominance over FM6. FH3 hits a million almost as FM6 hits only 550k or so. FH3 also hits 1.5 million before FM6 even hits 1 million. FH3 is currently on 2,035,399 (before christmas) and FM6 didn't even hit 2 million until mid February of the next year. Again a reminder this is just number of players who've set a leaderboard time on the first race.
So what does this tell us? Well that FH3 is outpacing FM6 in terms of number of players by quite a large margin, a margin that to be honest I didn't expect at all. I thought maybe FH3 would do slightly better than FM6, but not 500k better.
Do you guys think there is enough of a gap to suggest that perhaps Horizon has overtaken Motorsport in terms of popularity etc? Do you think this would worry Turn 10 in anyway at all?
I thought it was very interesting too see. Not often a spin-off ends up rapidly outpacing the main franchise in terms of number of players played.