Microsoft got a whole lot of people to play Halo and Forza

theverge.com:

Microsoft seems to have had a lot of success getting people to try out its games. During the company’s earnings call on Tuesday, CEO Satya Nadella said that 20 million people had played Halo Infinite and 18 million people had played Forza Horizon 5. While it’s worth noting that those numbers will include people who played for a few minutes and didn’t stick around, it speaks to the pull of the just-download-it-and-give-it-a-whirl model.

Both games can be played without any direct cost; Horizon 5 is available on the Xbox Game Pass subscription service, which has around 25 million subscribers according to Microsoft, and Halo Infinite’s multiplayer uses a free-to-play model (though non-Game Pass subscribers will have to buy the campaign separately).

While both games have been hotly anticipated, it’s hard to imagine they’d have drawn in as many players if they had to pay $70 upfront. The data seems to bear this out too — Horizon 5 seems on track to be the biggest in the series. In late 2020, Microsoft announced that 24 million people had played the previous entry in the Forza series. But that was over two years after the game, Horizon 4, came out, and well over a year after it hit Game Pass. But the 18 million people who tried Horizon 5 did so in under four months. That’s a lot for a racing game not named Mario Kart — for reference, in 2017 the studio behind the Gran Turismo series said that the most popular entry at the time, Gran Turismo 3 A-spec, had sold just under 15 million copies.

With over 20 million Spartans joining us so far, we’re thrilled to announce that <a href=«https://twitter.com/hashtag/HaloInfinite?src=hash&ref_src=» https: www.theverge.com>#HaloInfinite

is the biggest launch in Halo franchise history! Thank