If you’re an Xbox player with an active Xbox Game Pass membership and you haven’t checked out Forza Horizon 5 yet, you’re one of the few. Thanks to an eagle-eyed fan checking the in-game menu, we now know that Playground Games’ impressive open-world racing game has reached more people than the population of San Marino – and it’s not far off Monaco, too. That’s right, the Forza Horizon 5 player count has hit over 34 million.
It’s no secret that Forza Horizon 5 is one of the best racing games on Xbox right now and easily one of the best Xbox Game Pass games to get stuck into, but the fact that it looks like this game has reached well over 34 million players is astounding when you think about it. That’s a number higher than the population of entire countries, like the British Virgin Islands, Gibraltar, and San Marino. The densely populated Monaco is only home to two million more people and it’s almost four times the population of London and well over the population of the entire state of Texas.
As highlighted by Xbox fan ‘SnapBlastPLAY‘ on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), an in-game menu in Forza Horizon 5 shows that there’s a total of 34,057,253 players who have – at some point – played this racing game. Of course, the active player count is going to be quite a bit lower than that, but that number is still a staggering amount.
It’s worth taking this with a small pinch of salt as we don’t know how accurate this number actually is, but you would have to imagine that it would be more – if anything. Playground Games would have no reason to inflate these numbers, and we don’t think they would anyway.
Interestingly, this number also appears to be higher than the number of Xbox Game Pass subscribers – which is an impressive amount. Of course, players can buy Forza Horizon 5 without Xbox Game Pass and several Xbox series console bundles come with codes for Forza Horizon 5, but this is seriously impressive.
As reported by Game World Observer, Xbox’s senior director of global brand and integrated marketing Craig McNary has recently claimed that over 30 million players are active Game Pass members – information that dropped not long after Starfield launched.
Earlier this month, VGChartz reported that around 11.3 million Xbox Series consoles had been sold since their release by August 2023. This number was undoubtedly bolstered by Starfield dropping the month after, but that also just goes to show you how many Xbox One players have played Forza Horizon 5 – which also means that, technically, everyone with a current gen console might have played Forza Horizon 5 at some point.
If you want to play Forza Horizon 5 for yourself and see what you’re missing out on, you can sign up to Xbox Game Pass below and see for yourself.
Is this one of the best games on console at the moment? Well, it’s certainly one of the best if you like fast cars and stunning visuals. The handling is excellent, the selection of content available is staggering, and the customization options are extensive. What more could you want, really?
For those of you who want to know what else Game Pass gets you, though, you can check out all the Xbox Game Pass games currently available and all the new Xbox games you have to look forward to with our October 2023 Xbox Game Pass games list here. Oh, and you should keep an eye on the best Black Friday Xbox deals – there’s bound to be some bargains popping up.