PlayStation has just revealed the sales figures for Horizon Forbidden West, and it’s done pretty well. 8.4 million copies well, in fact. That’s no mean feat, and should be considered a great success by all conventional metrics. So why does it feel like a failure?
First, let’s quantify that 8.4 million, which Sony confirmed in yesterday’s blog. It sounds good, but is it good? Compared to some of the very best PlayStation games, it’s lagging a little behind. The Last of Us Part 2, one of the pinnacles of Sony’s first-party offerings, sold over 10 million copies in its first two years. Spider-Man, with the thunderous Marvel IP to back it up, shifted over 13 million in its first year, a number that has increased to 33 million after a remaster and PC port, and another four years on the shelves. Forbidden West’s predecessor, Horizon Zero Dawn, sold 7.6 million copies in its first year.
So Forbidden West is lagging slightly behind Sony’s golden child with a year still to go, and has outsold the first game in its own series? That’s all good news, right? Maybe. The most apt comparison for Horizon Forbidden West is God of War Ragnarok, which is another Sony exclusive sequel released in 2022. Kratos’ adventure sold an astonishing 11 million copies in just three months, blowing Aloy out of the water. Is it poor timing? Is Norse mythology an easier sell than weird-robot-post-apocalypse-future?
A combination of those two reasons will always favour the big bald bloke. The Norse pantheon is probably the most recognisable and marketable mythos in the world, followed closely by Greek, which has already been used to build up the core God of War fanbase. Ragnarok also released just before Christmas, whereas Forbidden West suffered from the same curse as its predecessor, releasing just seven days before the most anticipated game of the year. Zero Dawn preceded Breath of the Wild, and Forbidden West was immediately overshadowed by Elden Ring.
The comparison to Zero Dawn doesn’t make for great reading either. While Forbidden West outsold Aloy’s first outing by some 800,000 copies, that might not be the flex you think. Zero Dawn was establishing an IP, it was completely new, and it had to start from the very bottom. Sequels should build on that groundwork, in terms of both iterating on the gameplay and outselling the earlier games. When Zero Dawn launched, PlayStation was still fighting in the console war trenches. The PS4 era was when Sony cemented itself as the prestige triple-A powerhouse, setting up easy wins for story-heavy RPGs on the PS5. By Forbidden West, it was supposed to be taking a victory lap.
In the current financial climate, studio executives want eternally growing profits. They don’t settle for sustainable revenue, they want more and they want it now. A sequel not outselling its forebear is likely the end of a series in 2023. I’m not saying the Horizon series is over – Forbidden West outsold Zero Dawn after all – but I wonder if the top brass will be happy with these sales figures, especially when they can point to the likes of God of War as a comparison.
However, the most damning failure of Horizon Forbidden West is not measured by dollars, but by conversation. The buzz around the game died a week after it released and hasn’t picked up since. Nobody talks about the Horizon series. They may buy the games, but does anybody care? Even the DLC only sparked discussion because of review-bombing around Aloy’s queer identity. Of course, this is partially down to the Elden Ring effect, but if FromSoftware’s open world masterpiece had been released a week before Horizon, I think we would have had the same result and Forbidden West would still have gone under the conversational radar. It’s a question of quality, not timing.
The Horizon series needs refreshing. In many ways, it feels like a hangover of open-world games long since extinct, a techno-dinosaur that has somehow found itself out of time as FromSoftware and Nintendo build the pyramids around it. God of War has its single-shot gimmick, The Last of Us prides itself on realism and storytelling, and Horizon needs something similar, something to set it apart from the crowd. Its sales figures might be doing well(ish), but the series will never stand out and dominate the gaming conversation if it continues as is.