Forza Horizon 6’s Japan setting and 2026 launch officially confirmed, following leak

Update: Microsoft just formally announced Forza Horizon 6 during their Tokyo Game Show event, confirming the Japan setting and 2026 release with a lovely shot of go-to Japanese iconography Mount Fuji. No in-game footage or screenshots for now, though. Not even a little kei car.

Original story continues below:

Microsoft’s next Forza Horizon game is set in Japan, going by an Instagram ad that appears to have been posted ahead of reveal. The post has been taken down, but one of the internet’s many screen-grabbing Eyes of Sauron has preserved it for posterity. “The Horizon Festival is heading to Japan,” it reads. I imagine that Japan is also where Microsoft had planned to announce the game – they’ve doing a showcase at Tokyo Game Show 2025 in around an hour’s time. Microsoft have previously indicated that the next Forza will launch in 2026.

The last Forza Horizon game was set in Mexico. We called it “not the best racing game ever made, but a contender for best driving game”. I like this framing inasmuch as I suck at racing, and am much more inclined to use car games as an excuse to bumble around and investigate some generally rather eerie background scenery. Forza Horizon 4 was set in a weirdly compressed and restitched amalgam of the UK. I remember visiting that game’s version of the Yorkshire moors and thinking “man, what have they been feeding the heather”.

The wider Forza enterprise has fallen on hard times in the wake of Microsoft’s most recent round of mass layoffs, aka “the enigma of success”. Forza Motorsport series creator Turn 10 have been hardest hit, reportedly losing almost half their staff. Turn 10 Studios content co-ordinator Fred Russell posted back in July that the studio had “shuttered the Forza Motorsport space”, with the remaining staff now focussing on the development of Forza Horizon alongside Playground Games. In a social media statement, Microsoft assured players that they “will continue to support Forza Motorsport and Forza Horizon 5”.

Microsoft executives have plenty of anxieties to quell at TGS this year. They also go into the show under the cloud generated by their reported business dealings with the Israeli military, as it continues its bloody assault on Gaza. A number of first-party Xbox developers including one Playground staffer have signed the No Azure For Apartheid petition for Microsoft to divest from Israel’s armed forces.