Forza Horizon 5 is now on PlayStation: here's how Playground Games made it happen

Just before Forza Horizon 5 released on PS5 on 29 April, the game reached a total of 45 million players since it first hit Xbox platforms and PC in 2021. A figure roughly equivalent to the total population of Argentina.

“It’s funny,” says lead game designer David Orton. “I’ve done that before, where I try to imagine 45 million players – if I saw them in real life, what would that look like?"

“ Early on it was like, [as many as the population of] Sweden, that's pretty good”, says art director Don Arceta. “And then it kept getting bigger.”

At the time of writing, it’s been just less than a week since Forza Horizon 5 made its debut on unfamiliar PS5 territory, where a further 75 million players are getting their first chance to enjoy the festival atmosphere of open-world Mexico. But before we get too distracted trying to work out which country’s population the game might have exceeded by now, it’s worth considering what a seismic moment this is for the racing genre.

It’s akin to Gran Turismo turning up on Xbox. Since the franchise began with Forza Motorsport on 3 May 2005, exactly twenty years ago today, it’s been a first-party affair, a breezier response to Polyphony’s buttoned-up PlayStation exclusive racer. As the years went by, Forza split into two flavours: a track-focused simulation and the open-world Horizon series, where the physics is a touch more forgiving, the activities far more varied, and the sound of a massive bass bin pumping out EDM never completely out of earshot.

First things first, then. Was it a technical challenge to bring the game to PlayStation?

“ As you can imagine, Forza Horizon runs on a proprietary engine built for Xbox,” says Arceta. “All the code is kind of based around the Xbox environment, that ecosystem. So it was quite a challenge kinda getting that to work on something that is completely foreign.

“ The PlayStation 5 version was developed by Panic Button and they've done some amazing work with other games, bringing 'em to other platforms. They're just wizards over there.”

“ It is funny,” says Orton. “I remember we were doing play tests where we had sort of two screens side by side, and for a while we had like a sticker saying ‘this is the PlayStation 5’, and ‘this is the Xbox version’. And at one point those stickers got removed and it was like, you just didn't know which one was which.”

It’s not just the developers who were satisfied with FH5’s technical adaptation on PS5. Reviews have been glowing, and the visual fidelity the new version hits belies the game’s four years since release on Xbox and PC. It’s still as good as racing games can possibly look.

Thing is, a lot’s happened in those four years. The car list has expanded massively – now including the BMW 850CSi we ritually hound every racing game developer to add – and so has the volume of events, player-made content, and so on. As a live service game, Forza Horizon 5 is a slightly different entity every day. Which makes it a bit tricky to decide which ‘Forza Horizon 5’ you’re going to port over to a new platform. 

“We’ve gone for content parity across PS5 and Xbox,” says Orton. “Post-launch we’ve added so much content – I think we’re up to over 900 cars now.

"We’ve had our Rally Adventure DLC, and the Hot Wheels DLC. Plus our car packs and all our free updates like Festival Playlist, all of that is gonna be content parity with PlayStation.”

That coincides with the introduction of Horizon Realms, a new feature for all platforms in which locales and experiences from across FH5 make their return. Ice rinks from winter events, the stunt park, the retrowave highway, they’re all here.

There’s a very pleasing symmetry to FH5 arriving on a new platform in such complete, retrospective form at the same moment that its parent series turns 20. That’s right, 2005 was a long time ago, and Forza Motorsport released into a different world. Having shaped the modern face of the Horizon games, what are Orton and Arceta’s first memories of the franchise?

“For me it was Horizon 3 on Xbox One,” says Arceta. “ I just remember the initial drive so vividly. Of course on the art side, I was just taken aback by the visuals that the Xbox One was producing. But I remember at the very end when you hit the beach in the Lamborghini Centenario… It was just an amazing moment for me.”

“ For me, it's Horizon 1,” says Orton. I vividly remember booting up the game and hearing Porter Robinson’s ‘Language’. That song was the title track on the ‘Press Start’ screen on Horizon 1, and I just remember as soon as that music kicked in with the visuals, with this open world Forza game, just thinking, ‘There's something so exciting here.’

“I was actually working at another developer and I remember researching Playground Games – where are they? And I was actually in the public park just opposite [their offices]. I was like, ‘They’re right there! Wow. That’s where I want to be.’”

Forza Horizon 5 is available now on PS5, and it’s still available on PC and Xbox platforms. Let’s see if we can get the player count higher than South Korea’s population.