Forza Horizon 4 will become unavailable for digital purchase later this year. This led to tens of thousands of players joining the game at the same time.
What happened?
On June 25, Playground Games announced that Forza Horizon 4 will be delisted from Steam and Microsoft Store on December 15, 2024. The main reason behind this decision is the expiration of licensing agreements and other partnerships.
Unfortunately, this is not a rare case for racing titles with licensed cars and brands. Sometimes developers and publishers also delist games with multiplayer features and shut down their servers due to the decline in the number of players over time. But the latter doesn’t apply specifically to Forza Horizon 4.
Playground Games noted that users who own the game will be able to play it after December 15, both offline and online. Those who played FH4 through Game Pass and purchased at least one DLC will have access to its standard edition for free.
Launched in September 2018, Forza Horizon 4 received critical acclaim and became a global hit. As of November 2020, it had reached 24 million players across Xbox and PC.
Players flock to Forza Horizon 4 after delisting announcement
Xbox is a closed platform, so it is impossible to say how much the game’s player count has increased there since June 25. However, we can see the stats on Steam, and Forza Horizon 4 is currently posting its best numbers since launch.
According to SteamDB, the game surpassed 48k concurrent players on June 26 — more users than it had online in April 2021 after launching on Valve’s platform. And today FH4 reached its new all-time high of 71,598 CCU.
The game 4 had 6,561 peak concurrent players on June 25, down almost 1,000% from the new record. 71.5k CCU is also a 550% increase from last month’s peak of 11k CCU, which is quite impressive.
For comparison, Forza Horizon 5 peaked at just over 81k CCU after its launch in November 2021. The game currently averages around 11-13k peak concurrent players every month.
It is also worth noting that FH4 is now 80% off on all platforms, which is likely its largest discount ever. This was another major factor in the increased player count ($12 for a hit racing game looks like a bargain).