The Forza series has broken out, and continues to sell surprisingly well with each new iteration. With Forza Horizon 3‘s mainstream success, especially, the series has broken out of its mold of appealing only to the hardcore car and racing game enthusiasts.
According to Turn 10, however, that success has spilled over into the Motorsport games, too. “When you look at the pure motivations of players, you can sort of extract it from the racing genre and start looking at things like exploration, competition, single player vs multiplayer… and not just what they want to do, but why they want to do it,” said Turn 10’s Creative Director Dan Greenawalt in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz. “When you get down to that level, you won’t be very surprised to find that people who like cars, and like open world exploration, gravitate towards Horizon. People who really like hardcore competition and like cars, they gravitate towards Motorsport.
“But then you have this massive group that just goes towards both, because they like playing with a community who like cars. It is a lot more simple than… what I hear a lot is people talking about are sub-genres, and whether things are sims or arcade-style games, and a whole lot of things that just doesn’t prove out in the motivations of our players, nor in the numbers. We have a tremendous number of players playing both.”
Given just how consistently well made these games have been, I am glad they are doing well. Forza Horizon 3 is a system seller game for me- and I can’t wait to see where the Forza franchise goes from here.