Where Is Forza Horizon 6?

This month, Microsoft held its annual summer Xbox Showcase. With E3 now well and truly dead, it’s become the place for the biggest titles to land on the Xbox platform to be revealed – and there were some big hitters.

We got another look at the new Fable title, a first sight of gameplay for the hotly-anticipated Perfect Dark reboot and there was no shortage of fanfare for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 – the first title in the behemoth franchise since Microsoft acquired Activision last autumn.

Yet, for those of us with a penchant for racing games, there was a rather notable absence. There was no Forza Horizon 6. So, where is it?

We know game development cycles are only growing in length. As hardware offers the capabilities for more mesmerising graphics and players demand more scale in terms of sheer map sizes, content and ways to play, it’s taking developers more time to produce titles we know and love.

Forza hasn’t been immune to this. Motorsport switched from a rigid two-year cycle to a six-year gap between 7 and 2023’s reboot (not that it did it any favours), while there was a three-year wait between Horizon 4 and 5.

Naturally, then, it’d be fair to have expected at least three years until the arrival of 6 but now we’re into that window and it’s no clearer when a new entry will arrive.

Its absence comes at a time that Microsoft really could do with jump-starting sales of its consoles too. The Series X and S haven’t exactly flown off the shelves. Depending on which sources you believe, sales of the two total around 25 million as of the last financial year – compared with 59 million PlayStation 5s.

There could be very good potential reasons we haven’t seen Horizon 6. Developer Playground Games is hard at work on the aforementioned Fable reboot, its very first non-Forza title, set to arrive next year. We’re led to believe there are two distinct Forza and Fable teams in the studio, though, so that debunks that one.

Perhaps Microsoft wants to give Forza Motorsport room to breathe. Turn 10 has been hard at work on improving the title since a frankly poor launch, and suddenly directing its player base to a totally new title could undermine all of that.

Horizon 5 has been getting its own share of monthly updates as well, bringing new cars and world changes that give you a legitimate reason to revisit virtual Mexico. It’s been a while since any extensive expansion though, and there’s no news on another coming.

Perhaps simply, it needs more time. We have no concrete evidence the title exists, but it’d be safe to assume that it’s in the works and perhaps with ambitions that have extended its development cycle. Maybe 2025 is the year. We’ve popped Playground an email for some insight, though we’re not expecting to hear anything back.

There is a rather gigantic cloud looming over the world of gaming next year, though – GTA VI.

Rockstar Games parent company Take-Two has confirmed it’ll be coming in autumn 2025. If you’re Microsoft, would you want to release your headline AAA open-world driving game in its traditional autumn window alongside the most hotly-anticipated open-world game of perhaps all time?

I’m no marketing expert and am fully prepared to have egg on my face with this statement, but I wouldn’t. With no Horizon this year, it’s hard to imagine it arriving before 2026. Fingers crossed for a virtual Japan to make that gap worth it.