Forza Horizon 4 With Good Launch on Steam Despite Mixed Reviews
Forza Horizon 4 is doing very well on Steam. Players complain about technical problems, but these did not prevent the gane from recording the second best debut among racing games.
- Forza Horizon 4 is selling very well on Steam;
- The game achieved the second highest activity record among the racing games on Valve's service;
- Players complain about the poor technical condition of the Steam version.
Three days ago, the racing game Forza Horizon 4 debuted on Steam. It's one of the strongest brands in its genre, so we were curious how the game would do on Valve's service. Now we already know that the launch in this store turned out to be quite a success.
The current activity record is 20,203 people playing simultaneously and it was set yesterday. We expect that it will be beaten any moment now, because the games usually record their best results on weekends.
While 20k simultaneous players may seem like a modest number when compared to the achievements of Valheim, for example, Forza Horizon 4 already holds the second highest activity record for a racing game on Steam. Only F1 2020 scored higher with 24,010 simultaneous players right after its release. The difference is so small that this weekend Microsoft's game has a good chance to become the new leader.
Forza Horizon 4 is very popular on Steam despite the fact that this version seems to lack polish. The result is that only 69% of user reviews are positive. Players complain about the high price, bugs that cause the engine to freeze, performance drops, and sound issues. Surprisingly, these technical imperfections are not present in the release available on Microsoft Store. It remains to be hoped that all the imperfections will be fixed quickly.
Technical issues did not prevent the game from becoming a big hit. The success of Forza Horizon 4 is especially evident when we compare the title's performance with other recent racing games released on Steam. Need for Speed: Heat holds the activity record with 6408 simultaneous players, The Crew 2 has 7982, BeamNG.drive has 9215, and DiRT 5 scored a mere 1203.
The popularity of Forza Horizon 4 is all the more impressive because it is not a new game. The title debuted on PC in October 2018, but only on Microsoft Store. It is also available as part of the Game Pass subscription. However, as we can see, despite this, many people have been waiting for the project's release on Steam.
This is not the first such a case. Earlier, similar successful debuts in Valve store included Sea of Thieves, Titanfall 2 and Satisfactory. All of these game were first available on other services for a long time, and yet their releases on Steam turned out to be great successes.
