Forza Horizon 6 is out. Buy a key or boot up Game Pass?

Forza Horizon 6 launched on 19 May and made noise straight away. A Metacritic score of 91, a 10 out of 10 from IGN, the highest review average of any game released in 2026. A week after early access opened, more than 6 million people had jumped in, and on Steam alone the series record fell: over 270,000 players at once. Early access by itself brought in around $140 million, according to industry reports. In short, if you were waiting for this one, you are no longer asking "whether" but "how to buy it for the least money".

That second question is what this post answers. There are three routes: a key for the standard edition, the pricier Premium edition, or a Game Pass subscription. Each costs different money and gives you something different. I will break them down into concrete numbers, because the gap between the cheapest and the most expensive option is easily a few hundred zloty for the very same game.

What actually came out on 19 May

Let us start with the facts, so there is something to calculate from.

Forza Horizon 6 officially has two editions. The standard one costs $69.99. The Premium edition is $119.99, so $50 more, and it adds early access plus a pack of extra content together with future expansions. Early access opened on 15 May, and the full release for everyone was on 19 May.

Those are figures from the US price list. On the Polish market the numbers look different, because publishers use regional pricing, separate price lists for separate countries. The direction is the same though: Premium costs clearly more than the standard edition, and the standard edition sits on the top shelf of a big PC release.

The second thing, and it is central to the whole calculation: Forza Horizon 6 is on Game Pass from day one. The standard edition landed in the subscription on 19 May, exactly on release day. That turns the math upside down, because suddenly you do not have to buy the game at all to play it.

Three ways to actually play it

First: you buy a key for the standard edition. The official price is $69.99, but on key marketplaces such as EEneba, KKinguin, GGamivo and GG2A, the real figure can be noticeably lower, because those stores pool offers from many sellers at once. You can check the current price below and in the comparison tool.

Sprawdź grę: forza-horizon-6

A key has one advantage no other option gives you: the game is yours forever. You pay once and the matter is closed. In five years you will still launch it, no matter what happens to subscription prices.

Second route: the Premium edition at $119.99. The same as the standard one, plus early access and future add-ons. I will come back to it separately in a moment, because it is the trickiest of the three options.

Third: Game Pass. You do not buy the game, you pay a monthly subscription and play for as long as you keep paying. In Poland, PC Game Pass now costs 53.99 zloty a month. Forza Horizon 6 has been in that subscription since release day, so you can literally start playing today for under 54 zloty.

Key versus Game Pass: how to do the math

There is no single right answer for everyone here. There is, however, a simple calculation you can run yourself in thirty seconds.

Open the comparison tool and check what a key for the standard Forza costs today. Divide that amount by 54, the monthly price of PC Game Pass. The result is the number of subscription months you get for the same money as one key.

Now an honest question to yourself: how much time will you really spend in this game? Forza Horizon is a series some people sink 200 hours into, while others run through the campaign in two weeks and put the controller down. If you are in the second group, two months of Game Pass at roughly 108 zloty will work out cheaper than a key, and on top of that you get access to the rest of the subscription catalogue. If you know you will keep coming back to Forza for years, the key wins, because a subscription you pay forever and a key you pay only once.

My rule is simple: if a game is not a title you return to for years, a subscription almost always works out cheaper at launch. If it is, buy the key, but not necessarily on day one. The price of a key will fall, and a game at launch and the same game six months later are the same game, except the later one already has the full set of patches.

The $119.99 Premium edition, and who it is for

Premium is the option where it is easiest to overpay. It costs $50 more than the standard edition and sells two things: early access and future extra content.

Early access for Forza Horizon 6 was four days, from 15 to 19 May. If you paid the Premium surcharge purely to race four days ahead of everyone else, that is a very expensive four days.

That leaves the add-ons. And here is the catch: you pay up front for content that does not exist yet and whose quality nobody knows. Expansions in earlier Forza games were genuinely good, but it is still a bet in the dark. The Premium edition makes sense in one scenario: you are sure you will play everything that comes out for this game, and you have worked out that the bundle is cheaper than buying the add-ons separately later. In any other case you take the standard edition and add specific DLC when you already know it is good, and once it has had time to drop in price.

Game Pass is cheaper than six months ago, but there is a catch

This is where it gets interesting, because the price of Game Pass has been bouncing around lately.

On 1 October 2025 Microsoft raised Game Pass Ultimate from $20 to $30 a month. That was a huge increase, up by half from one month to the next. Players answered with anger and a wave of cancellations. On 21 April 2026 Microsoft backed down: the new head of the gaming division, Asha Sharma, wrote in a memo to staff that Ultimate was "too expensive", and prices came down.

After that cut it looks like this. In Poland, PC Game Pass costs 53.99 zloty a month, down from 62.99 zloty. Game Pass Ultimate dropped to 84.99 zloty from 114.99 zloty. To play Forza Horizon 6 on PC the cheaper option, PC Game Pass, is enough, because the standard edition of the game has been in it since release.

The catch involves Call of Duty. Alongside the price cut, Microsoft announced that new Call of Duty releases will no longer arrive on Game Pass on launch day. They will land in the subscription about a year later. Older entries already in the catalogue stay. If you bought Game Pass mainly for a fresh Call of Duty at launch, that model has just ended for you. For Forza it makes no difference, but it is good to know what exactly you are paying for.

Cheap back-catalogue: the fifth game and the lesson from the fourth

The release of a new entry is always the best moment to buy the previous one. Forza Horizon 5 is still on sale, still getting new cars and music every month, and once the sixth game is out its price will only fall. That is dozens of hours of excellent arcade driving for a fraction of the price of a new release.

Sprawdź grę: forza-horizon-5

And now the lesson that costs real money. Forza Horizon 4 was pulled from sale on 15 December 2024. Microsoft removed it from every digital store because licences for some of the cars expired. Anyone who bought the game earlier still plays it with no problem. Anyone who did not make it in time can no longer buy it legally, at any price, in any store.

This is not an abstraction. Forza Horizon 5 will one day share the fate of the fourth game, because car licences expire in every racing game. Nobody knows when it will happen, but it is certain that it will. If the fifth game is on your wishlist, the window to buy it is not forever.

What I would do in your shoes

Forza Horizon 6 is the best-reviewed game of the year, and there is no point pretending it is not worth playing. The only question is how much to pay for it.

If you are not sure how much time you will spend in it, start with PC Game Pass at 53.99 zloty. You play the same day, and after a month or two you will know whether it is your game for years to come. If it turns out it is, you buy a key once the price drops and you own the game. If it is not, you cancel the subscription and you have come out cheaper than buying the full edition blind.

If you already know that Forza is your series and you will return to it many times, buy a key for the standard edition. Check the price in the comparison tool, set an alert, and do not rush release day. Leave the Premium edition for the moment when the announced add-ons actually come out and turn out to be good.

And while you are at it, take a look at Forza Horizon 5. It is cheaper than ever, and its sales window, exactly like the window of the fourth game, will one day close.