TLDR is in bold
Firstly I agree that Forza has not done great, is full of bugs and has not released to a great reception from fans and critics alike so this isn't a post to try and say that Forza has done better than it has, it is more of a post arguing how much weight these
boxed charts really carry in the grand scheme of things.
<1% relevance...
Boxed charts aren't the most accurate metric.
MS have been pushing people to buy digital for a long time and if that was a success then you would naturally see boxed sales on Xbox drop through the floor. I am not trying to play defence force here just putting across a point of view that is more representative of my own circumstances. My own personal gaming purchase habits would never register on these boxed game charts and judging by the responses in the below thread...
Will you be quitting gaming entirely, jump to Nintendo or PC (if you haven't), or just give up and switch to full digital on Xbox or Playstation?
www.neogaf.com
It seems that my own habits are not too far away from the average these days. Microsoft were certainly the first console maker to start the push towards digital only and they have also shown the most commitment to making their customers digital back catalogue available on current and future consoles (as well as PC) so it stands to reason that their customers would skew the sales heavily away from boxed whereas both Sony and Nintendo have not given off signals that have been anywhere near as convincing. There is a reason that Playstation store gift cards are so popular (people don't trust Sony with their credit card details), Sony also charged for upgrades from PS4 to PS5 games and are more happy to remaster games than continue supporting them across generations. Nintendo are even worse, forcing people to buy the exact same game time after time on the latest console, dropping support completely for previous generations as soon as possible. More people buy boxed for PS and Nintendo than Xbox.
On the other side of the coin, both Sony and Nintendo have a much larger userbase so you would expect them to have a bigger impact on the sales of a game and when a game is exclusive to Xbox (taking PC out of this as no one buys boxed PC games anyway) it will naturally have a much smaller chance of getting into the charts than an exclusive on the other two systems. Third party games always do better than exclusives anyway and that does show in the charts.
So, Xbox has a much smaller userbase but also that userbase is (not factually as far as i can make out but more than likely) more inclined to buy digitally as well. We don't really know the majority of the factual information needed to fully analyse it as we don't know the split in sales between physical and digital for any of the 3 consoles and we don't get the sales figures from the digital stores either. We don't know the Gamepass numbers, we don't know how many Gamepass subscribers played Forza and we don't know how many of them bought the game or upgraded to the premium edition. But, we can look at data available for other titles.
We can look at Minecraft in the boxed charts. It is the Switch version that remains fairly consistently in the boxed charts even though it was released on Switch 6 years ago. The Switch is not the most popular platform for the game with mobile being easily the biggest platform for it. Minecraft has sold 5 million copies on Switch as of October 2022 (Wikipedia) and has sold more on Switch that both Xbox and Playstation yet, total sales of Minecraft are over 300 million (Minecraft Live 2023). So that means
the console that has shifted the most copies of Minecraft still only accounts 1.7% of the total sales. Add to that the
boxed sales will only be a fraction of this 1.7% as well (at most 50%). You really only get boxed games for consoles so all in all, boxed sales are nearly irrelevant as a metric for how popular Minecraft is.
If anything I would argue the point that Sony and Nintendo gamers are the most reluctant to move to digital purchases and boxed charts are the biggest proof of this.