I have been following the Forza Horizon 6 PS5 saga closely since it launched on Xbox and PC in May, mostly because I own both an Xbox Series X and a PS5, and I genuinely did not know which console I would end up playing it on. That question just got messier again. For a few days it looked like the whole thing had settled down. Now it has flipped right back into rumor territory, and the timing is almost funny.
Here is where things stand today, and why this small story about one racing game says a lot about where Xbox is heading as a company.
The Short Version, If You Are In A Hurry
Forza Horizon 6 launched on Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and PC on May 19, 2026. A PS5 version was promised for later in 2026 with no exact date given. In late August, veteran Xbox reporter Tom Warren of The Verge said he did not expect the PS5 version to arrive in 2026. That set off weeks of confusion. Then, on September 8, Playground Games posted an update saying the PS5 version “will be releasing on PS5 later this year.” One day later, Warren reported through The Verge that Microsoft is actually planning to delay the PS5 release into early 2027, timed to launch alongside the game’s first expansion, close to the one year anniversary of the original release around May 2027.
So right now, on paper, you have Playground Games saying 2026 and one of the most reliable Xbox reporters in the industry saying early 2027. Neither side has fully backed down, and Microsoft has not issued an official statement confirming a delay.
How This Started: The August Rumor
The first crack appeared on August 27, when YouTuber Colt Eastwood posted a message asking if Playground Games was quietly delaying the PS5 port to 2027. Tom Warren replied directly on X with a short but pointed line: he was not expecting to see Forza Horizon 6 on PS5 in 2026. You can read that original post here.
What made this notable is that Warren is not a random commenter. He covers Xbox for The Verge and has broken accurate Xbox and Microsoft stories for years, so when he says he is “not expecting” something, people in the Xbox community tend to listen. IGN reported that it had separately confirmed similar information from its own sources around the same time, which added more weight to the original claim rather than it being one lone tweet.
A few days later, when someone else asked directly whether the game had been cancelled on PS5, Warren clarified that it was “definitely still releasing.” That distinction matters a lot. A delay and a cancellation are very different things, and at no point has anyone credible suggested Forza Horizon 6 is skipping PS5 entirely. The disagreement has always been about timing, not whether the game is coming.
Playground Games Pushes Back, Then Gets Contradicted Again
On September 8, the official Forza account posted a short update aimed directly at PlayStation players, telling anyone planning a trip to Discover Japan on PS5 to stay tuned, and confirming the game “will be releasing on PS5 later this year,” with an invitation to add it to a PlayStation Store wishlist.
That statement briefly looked like the end of the story. It read like an official correction to the rumor. Then, less than 24 hours later, The Verge published a new report from Warren stating that Microsoft is in fact planning to delay the release, citing sources familiar with Playground Games’ plans. According to that report, the studio wants the PS5 launch to line up with the release of Forza Horizon 6’s first expansion rather than shipping the base game alone, which points to a window before the one year anniversary of the original launch, so likely around spring 2027. Warren also specifically noted that the delay does not appear to be about avoiding competition from GTA 6, which had been an earlier theory floating around online.
So as of writing this, you have a public studio statement and a reporter’s sourced claim actively contradicting each other within the same 24 hour window. That almost never happens this cleanly, and it tells you that something is genuinely unresolved internally at Microsoft, even if the public messaging says otherwise. My own read, and this is just an opinion from someone who has watched a lot of these Xbox release cycles play out, is that Playground’s post was written before the final call was locked in, and Microsoft has not caught up with its own PR yet.
Why This Keeps Getting Tangled Up With Xbox Exclusivity
Part of why this story spread so fast is timing. Microsoft has been noticeably more willing to keep certain games as Xbox exclusives lately, including Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution. For a while, Xbox’s public position was that basically everything would eventually go multiplatform. That is no longer a safe assumption, and it is why people jumped to the conclusion that Forza Horizon 6 might be the next game to get pulled back into an exclusive lane.
Based on what has actually been reported, that does not appear to be what is happening here. Warren’s reporting frames this specifically as a scheduling and content pacing decision, tying the PS5 release to an expansion rather than treating PS5 access as leverage. It is worth separating those two things clearly. A delay for business timing reasons is not the same as a strategic exclusivity play, even though from the outside they can look similar for a few weeks.
Forza Horizon has sold well for years without any PlayStation release at all, so Microsoft does not need PS5 sales to justify the franchise financially. That actually makes a full exclusivity U-turn less likely here than it would be for a newer or less proven series.
Xbox Game Pass Is Also Quietly Testing New Pricing
While the PS5 story was unfolding, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate pricing has been going through its own separate shake up, and this part is not a rumor. It is documented across multiple user reports and screenshots.
Microsoft cut the standard price of Game Pass Ultimate from $29.99 to $22.99 back in April 2026. That alone was a meaningful reduction for monthly subscribers. Now, according to reports gathered from Reddit’s r/XboxGamePass community and covered by Notebookcheck and Game Rant, select former subscribers are being offered a locked in rate of $16.09 per month for 12 months, which works out to roughly $193 across the year instead of $275.88 at the standard rate. That is a savings of about $83.
The offers are not consistent across accounts. Some Reddit users reported being shown $18 or $20 per month instead of $16.09, and at least one current Ultimate subscriber said they were offered $20 per month for a year, which is an odd wrinkle since that person had not even lapsed. Others reported seeing no discount at all. This strongly suggests Microsoft is running a targeted, account-by-account pricing test rather than a broad public promotion, similar to how airlines and phone carriers price differently depending on your account history.
I will be honest, this kind of pricing model annoys me a little as someone who has kept an active Ultimate subscription for years without a break. There is no visible reward for staying subscribed, and in some cases loyal subscribers are being shown worse deals than people who cancelled. If you have been paying full price the whole time, it is worth logging into your Xbox account page just to check whether you have been offered anything, because right now there is no guarantee Microsoft will offer existing subscribers the same deal automatically.
This pricing test also lands right after Microsoft confirmed changes to Xbox Cloud Gaming limits set for November, which several outlets, including GamingHQ, have pointed out is a separate but related frustration for cloud focused subscribers. A cheaper annual rate does not fix a reduced cloud gaming allowance, and for players who mainly use Game Pass through cloud streaming rather than a console, the discount may not actually solve the problem that made them cancel in the first place.
The Bigger Problem Nobody Is Talking About: Optical Drives
Away from Forza and Game Pass, there is a quieter and honestly more interesting issue building around Microsoft’s next generation hardware, currently known internally as Project Helix. The question is simple: will it have a disc drive at all.
Reports from Windows Central and Digital Foundry have both pointed out that the global supply chain for optical disc drives is shrinking fast. These drives used to be dirt cheap, standard components in nearly every PC and console. Manufacturing support for them has been quietly drying up for years as physical media demand has dropped across the industry, and that makes future production runs more expensive and less predictable for console makers.
This creates a real dilemma for Microsoft. Dropping the disc drive entirely from the main console and offering an optional external drive is one path, similar to what Sony already does with the PS5 Digital Edition setup, except taken a step further. Letting third party manufacturers build compatible external drives is another option, which could spread out the cost risk. Either way, if component costs keep climbing, even an optional accessory could end up priced high enough to frustrate the exact players who wanted physical media in the first place.
This matters beyond just nostalgia for physical discs. Microsoft’s disc-to-digital program, which lets players convert eligible physical Xbox games into digital licenses, depends entirely on there still being working disc drives out in the world capable of reading those old games. If future consoles cannot read discs at all, that conversion pathway eventually becomes harder to use, especially for people who own large physical libraries built up across multiple Xbox generations.
Not every publisher is even participating in that disc-to-digital program right now. Ubisoft has opted out, which is a strange choice given how closely Ubisoft has worked with Xbox through Ubisoft+ and Xbox Play Anywhere. Sega has also not opted in as of now, though that could still change. Electronic Arts, on the other hand, is participating, which means EA disc owners get access to the PC version through Xbox Play Anywhere along with cloud gaming access.
PlayStation Is Digging Into Its Back Catalog Too
While Xbox works through its own pricing and hardware questions, Sony appears to be looking backward for its next move. According to a report first surfaced by MP1st and covered by outlets including VGC and Gagadget, Guerrilla Games is reportedly working with Polish studio People Can Fly on a Killzone remake or remaster, currently in early development. Neither Sony nor Guerrilla has confirmed this publicly yet, so treat it as a rumor for now, not an announcement.
The original Killzone launched on PS2 back in 2004, and the series has been dormant since Killzone: Shadow Fall released alongside the PS4 in 2013. That is well over a decade without a new entry, which is a long time for any shooter franchise to sit untouched, especially one that once positioned itself as Sony’s answer to Halo. People Can Fly is a sensible partner for a project like this given their track record with fast, physical shooters like Bulletstorm and Painkiller, and they already signed a codenamed co-development deal with PlayStation back in March 2025 known as Project Delta, though it is not confirmed whether that deal and this Killzone project are the same thing.
If Sony is genuinely willing to dust off Killzone, it raises an obvious follow up question for PlayStation fans who have been asking for years about Resistance, Sly Cooper, and Infamous. None of those have been confirmed to be in development. But a studio revisiting one dormant shooter franchise at least signals that Sony is not treating its older IP as permanently retired.
Sega Finally Explains Why It Killed Super Game
One more piece of recent industry news worth understanding here, because it explains a broader pattern across the industry this year. Sega president and COO Shuji Utsumi gave an interview to Nikkei, later translated and reported by Video Games Chronicle and Push Square, explaining exactly why Sega scrapped its long rumored Super Game project, first teased back in 2021.
Super Game was meant to be a brand new, large scale global IP built specifically as a live service title, not tied to an existing franchise like Sonic or Phantasy Star. Utsumi explained that Sega believed it had the technical ability to pull it off, saying the company had hypothesized it could successfully launch a large scale original IP globally and that the potential rewards would be enormous. But as research continued, the scale of investment and ongoing operational cost needed to match that ambition kept growing, to the point where Sega decided, in Utsumi’s own words, that taking on the challenge right now would be too risky.
Sega had already taken a $200 million financial write-off tied to its Rovio acquisition earlier in the year, and operating revenue had reportedly dropped by more than 54 percent year on year in that segment, so the company clearly had less appetite for open ended financial risk. Utsumi did note Sega has not abandoned live service games entirely, pointing to Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis, Sega Football Club Champions 2026, and Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage as ongoing examples, alongside an upcoming Total War: Warhammer 40,000 closed beta from Creative Assembly.
Instead, Sega’s near term plan leans on smaller, more contained projects with a clearer built in audience, including a Crazy Taxi revival, Persona 4 Revival, and other single player focused titles. Given how many live service games have failed to find an audience across the industry this year, walking away before spending years and hundreds of millions of dollars on an unproven original IP looks like a reasonable call in hindsight, even if it means Sega is playing things safer than it originally hoped to.
What This All Adds Up To
None of these stories exist in a vacuum. Xbox is trying to figure out how strict or loose its exclusivity strategy should be, testing new subscription pricing on a subset of its user base, and quietly wrestling with whether physical media has a real future on its next console. PlayStation is looking backward at old franchises for fresh ideas instead of only funding new ones. Sega just publicly admitted it walked away from its biggest live service bet because the math stopped making sense.
As for Forza Horizon 6 specifically, here is the honest state of things right now. Playground Games says PS5 players will get the game later in 2026. A well sourced report from The Verge says internally it is being pushed to early 2027, tied to the first expansion. Both cannot be fully true at the same time, and Microsoft has not issued a direct statement resolving the contradiction as of this writing. If you are a PlayStation player holding out, the safest plan is to keep watching for updates around the Tokyo Game Show or a future PlayStation State of Play, since either event would be a logical place for Microsoft or Sony to finally settle this.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Forza Horizon 6 confirmed for PS5 in 2026?
Playground Games publicly said on September 8 that the game will release on PS5 later in 2026. However, a report from The Verge published the very next day claims the release is internally planned for early 2027 instead. No official statement from Microsoft has resolved this contradiction yet.
Has Forza Horizon 6 on PS5 been cancelled?
No. Every report on this topic, including Tom Warren’s, has been about timing, not cancellation. Warren directly said the PS5 version is “definitely still releasing” when asked.
Why is Xbox Game Pass Ultimate showing different prices to different people?
Microsoft appears to be testing targeted, account based pricing to win back subscribers who previously cancelled. Reported rates for a 12 month period range from about $16 to $20 per month, compared to the standard $22.99, though not everyone is seeing an offer.
Will Xbox’s next console have a disc drive?
It is unclear. Shrinking global supply for optical disc drives is making them more expensive and harder to source, and reporting suggests Microsoft could ship its next console without a built in drive, possibly offering an external one instead.
Is the Killzone remake officially confirmed?
No. It is currently a rumor based on reporting from MP1st, with Guerrilla Games reportedly working alongside People Can Fly. Neither Sony nor Guerrilla has confirmed a project publicly.
A Note On Sourcing
This article is a roundup of ongoing reporting and unconfirmed rumors, not original reporting from official Microsoft, Sony, or Sega statements except where directly quoted or linked. Where a claim comes from a specific reporter, studio post, or executive interview, that source is linked directly at the point of the claim above rather than only listed here. Treat anything described as a report or rumor accordingly until an official confirmation is issued by the companies involved.