Once the crown jewel of Microsoft’s exclusives, the Forza series is now making its way to PlayStation 5, a move that all but confirms what has been evident for years: Xbox as a discrete gaming console is dead, and Microsoft is embracing the “play anywhere” ideology that renders its own hardware obsolete.

With Forza Horizon 5 set to launch on Sony PlayStation 5 this spring, the last remaining major XBOX “exclusive” franchise still relevant today will soon no longer be bound to Microsoft’s ecosystem.

This is more than just another game going multiplatform, it’s the latest and most damning evidence that the Xbox brand has completely pivoted away from traditional console gaming.

Forza Horizon 5, which launched on November 9, 2021, has been an overwhelming commercial success, amassing over 40 million players across XBOX, PC, and Game Pass. It’s one of the few XBOX games that has maintained relevance for years, standing out as a major financial success in an otherwise barren lineup.

Given this, it’s no surprise that Microsoft sees the PS5 as an untapped goldmine. Expanding to Sony’s ecosystem will only further boost sales, making it one of Microsoft’s most profitable ventures as the company shifts away from console exclusivity altogether.

And Microsoft needs the money. The disastrous Xbox Series S strategy, coupled with a lackluster game lineup and the aggressive expansion of Game Pass, has put the Xbox division in a precarious position.

The $75.4 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard King has only added pressure to maximize revenue, leading to Microsoft’s new focus: digital sales, subscriptions, and microtransactions. It’s clear that first-party exclusivity is no longer a priority.

Microsoft’s “Nothing is Xbox” Strategy

Microsoft has spent the past few months pushing Xbox as a “play anywhere” brand. PC? That’s Xbox. Cloud gaming? That’s Xbox. PlayStation? Now, that too is Xbox. But in trying to make everything Xbox, Microsoft has made nothing Xbox.

The Series X and S, once positioned as the brand’s flagship consoles, are struggling, with the PS5 outselling both combined by more than a 2:1 margin. Rather than reinforcing its hardware presence, Microsoft is prioritizing software expansion, bringing its games to multiple platforms to ensure their success even if its consoles fade into irrelevance.

It’s a strategy not unlike Sony’s approach of launching games on PC to secure additional revenue for its increasingly expensive cinematic single-player titles.

Forza Horizon 5 coming to PS5 marks a seismic shift, one that puts Sony’s own racing flagship, Gran Turismo 7, in a vulnerable position. Unlike Forza Horizon 5, GT7 remains locked to PlayStation hardware with no PC release, making it far less accessible.

By bringing Forza Horizon 5 to PS5, Microsoft is directly challenging Sony on its home turf and with Horizon’s broader mainstream appeal, it’s poised to dominate the racing genre on PlayStation just as it has on Xbox.

This is particularly ironic given Forza Horizon 5’s inclusivity-driven approach. Like all other modern gaming properties, the game goes out of its way to pander to modern DEI trends, featuring pride flags, neo-pronouns, queer representation, and even the ability to make your in-game avatar an amputee.

Yet despite all of this, it has managed to achieve massive success further proof that enjoyment and gameplay can override political concerns in the eyes of braindead consumers. If Forza Horizon 5 thrives on PS5, it will be a major embarrassment for Sony’s first-party racing efforts.

The Worst Console Generation in History

The ninth generation of consoles has been nothing short of a disaster. Both Sony and Microsoft have struggled to deliver must-play exclusives, as bloated development budgets, DEI-driven hiring practices, and sheer incompetence have resulted in an era of underwhelming releases.

Microsoft’s failures are especially glaring, titles like Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II and Hi-Fi Rush were relegated to Game Pass, their impact diminished by a service that discourages full-price purchases and devalues individual game sales, resulting in commercial failures and their inevitable studio closures.

Microsoft’s disastrous hardware strategy stands as the greatest failure of this console generation, perhaps even in gaming history. Despite the Xbox Series X featuring superior hardware to the PlayStation 5, including a full-fledged Zen 2 CPU core compared to the PS5’s modified design with a smaller FPU, as well as a more advanced GPU architecture, Microsoft’s decision to release the significantly weaker Xbox Series S has severely undermined its competitiveness.

Originally intended as an affordable entry point, the Series S has instead become a dead weight, holding back the Xbox platform and limiting its potential.

The biggest issue, aside from the massive drop in graphical power, just 20 Compute Units with 1,280 Stream Processors compared to the Series X’s 3,328 is the severe memory bandwidth limitation.

The Xbox Series X utilizes 16GB of GDDR6 in a split configuration: 10GB at 560GB/s and 6GB at 336GB/s, a retarded design, but not an outright deal breaker if this was the sole console offering by Microsoft.

In contrast, the Series S is crippled by just 10GB of total memory, further split into 8GB at 224GB/s and a pathetic 2GB at 56GB/s, creating a serious bottleneck that hampers next-gen performance.

In contrast, the PlayStation 5 features 16GB of unified memory running at 448GB/s, providing a far more balanced and accessible architecture. A bottleneck on the Series S that developers have repeatedly called a nightmare, though much of the blame falls on today’s increasingly incompetent development teams.

Many developers, already struggling due to bloated production cycles and corporate-driven priorities, have essentially given up on optimizing for the Series S. The result has been disastrous, with games like ARK: Survival Ascended launching in a nearly unplayable state, and even major studios beginning to abandon the weaker hardware altogether.

The team behind Black Myth: Wukong, one of 2024’s biggest releases, openly admitted they avoided the Xbox platform entirely due to the Series S’s crippling memory limitations.

The result? A snowball effect where Xbox is rapidly becoming the least desirable platform for third-party developers despite the Series X boasting superior hardware to the PlayStation 5. At this point, Xbox isn’t just an afterthought for game developers and it has become an afterthought for Microsoft itself.

The upcoming Forza Horizon 5 PlayStation 5 release is just the latest sign of Microsoft’s inevitable departure from the hardware business. Xbox isn’t about selling consoles anymore, it’s about pushing games, services, and subscriptions.

With the likes of Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II and even Indiana Jones and the Great Circle struggling commercially, it’s clear that exclusivity is dead for Microsoft, it must start selling its wares on the platform of the market leaders.

As the industry shifts toward cloud gaming, the days of dedicated Xbox hardware are numbered. The writing is on the wall, Xbox as a console brand is finished. All that remains is its software, and Microsoft is milking it for every last cent.

The only question left: how long before Halo and Gears of War follow Forza onto PlayStation?