Forza Horizon 6’s announcement is happening in 2025, and here’s why

I’m convinced a Forza Horizon 6 announcement is on the horizon, if you’ll excuse the shoddy pun. 2025 marks four years since the launch of Forza Horizon 5 — longer than the gap between any Forza title ever. While a formal announcement has 𒈔yet to be made, I think the hints are out there.

All cheekiness aside, there genuinely are reasons why one might expect Playground Games to finally come out and reveal that Forza Horizon 6 is in some stage of development. This is one of Xbox’s most successful game series by far, and it stands tall even in the wake of Halo‘s failures and Gears of War‘s long absence. It’s so successful that it’s even being ported over to PlayStation 5.

This is one of the key reasons why I think we’ll be getting a Forza Horizon 6 announcement in 2025. Before we get to that part of the equation, though, we’ve got to establish our timeline.

Forza Horizon 5 is done, for all intents and purposes

Though Playground Games hasn’t come out and said it, it should be clear by now that Forza Horizon 5 is winding down its post-launch support outline. It’s not done done in the same sense as its predecessor, Forza Horizon 4 (which was outright delisted), but the biggest chunks of bonus content have already been released, and we’ll get way fewer goodies as we go. This may sound like a downer, but it really isn’t. Forza Horizon 5 received the most substantial and comprehensive slew of content updates post-release of any other Forza game.

It surprised me to learn that it’s been four whopping years since Horizon 5 was released. In that time, we received a total of 42 full-sized content updates, which more-or-less doubled FH5’s vehicle roster. It’s a huge boon if you’re a lightweight gearhead with a penchant for collecting shiny baubles like I am. In context, the 43rd seasonal update, which is a bit smaller, doesn’t look too bad, but it does present us with an obvious change of pace: Forza Horizon 5 is winding down.

Driving this point home further still is the fact that there will be no more new Festival Playlists coming to FH5. Instead, the community will now be able to , which will then feature an assortment of appropriate goodies and events for players to pursue. It’s a good system on paper, of course, but it, too, shows us which way the winds are blowing.

With Forza Horizon 5 effectively wrapping up its content output, the next step is obvious

Keeping all of the above in mind, we can now circle back to the fact that Forza Horizon 5 is coming to PlayStation 5. Certainly, one could think of this as yet another in a long line of capitulations t💞o Sony, but I think there may be an extra layer to what Xbox and Playground Games are doing here. Specifically, this may be an adaptation of the way Sony has been handling most of its PlayStation-exclusive games: single-player, non-live-service titles only released on PC after a reasonable period of exclusivity ra♔n out.

I don’t think it’s an accident that Forza Horizon 5 is making its way to PlayStation now that its full-fledged live-service offerings have winded down. Xbox may instead be trying to expose an even greater number of players to Forza ahead of the franchise’s next flagship release. Let’s be honest: if you’re just in for it for fun, casual driving and an open-world content bonanza, nothing beats Forza Horizon. And PlayStation, specifically, has never had a Forza game before.

Don’t take this to mean that Forza Horizon 6 won’t be released on PlayStation on day one: it very well might. Yet, it’s also possible that Xbox will pursue a limited-time exclusivity setup in select cases. I feel that a franchise as prolific as Forza would definitely serve as the best possible guinea pig for this kind of approach.

Even though Playground Games’ Fable is coming, there’s no way Forza Horizon 6 isn’t being actively developed

In summary, then, I think we’re due to get an official confirmation and announcement of Forza Horizon 6 in 2025 because:

• This is the longest we’ve gone without the announcement of a new Horizon title.
• Forza Horizon 5‘s post-launch support is effectively over.
• Forza Horizon 5 is about to release on PlayStation 5, setting a new kind of precedent for the franchise.

There’s virtually no way Xbox won’t announce a new Forza Horizon game in 2025, taking these factors into account. The single potential issue with my theory, as it were, is that Playground Games has also been working on a fancy new Fable game for the past couple of years. This means the studio’s attention might’ve been divided to a greater degree than was otherwise expected. However, it should be obvious that the people working on Forza Horizon titles aren’t also pulling double-duty producing an ARPG.

Playground Games has two separate studios operating under its umbrella in Leamington Spa: one is located at Rossmore House, and the other at St. Albans House. Some crossover between the two is to be expected, but there still is a dedicated in-house Forza team working on the franchise, and they’ve not been twiddling their thumbs in the years prior.

So, Fable or no Fable, we’re getting a Forza Horizon 6 announcement in 2025, I’m sure of it. On a similar and entirely related note, do you reckon those car model fixes might be due for Forza Horizon 6 as well? Or am I just being highly optimistic here, again? Guess we’ll find out!