Forza Horizon 6's GOTY chances are higher than any racing game ever has

Forza Horizon 6 is, comfortably, the best-reviewed game of 2026 so far. It sits at the top of Metacritic and OpenCritic's leaderboards, without even having to make the usual exceptions for expansion packs, remasters, or very niche titles. It is the first 2026 game to crack the magic 90 rating on both review aggregation sites, and it looks like it's going to stay there. It's also an ultra-polished AAA game and extremely popular. It's obvious Game of the Year material.

We've been here before. In 2021, Forza Horizon 5 was in a similar position. In a relatively quiet year, it was the best-reviewed major release by some distance. It was continuing to expand the Forza Horizon series' audience, and just about everyone loved it. But The Game Awards jury, which usually follows critical opinion (being mostly made up of critics), decided Forza Horizon 5 didn't merit a Game of the Year nomination. That year, It Takes Two won the GOTY award from a field that included Metroid Dread, Psychonauts 2, and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart.

If you've been following my analysis of The Game Awards in Polygon's GOTY Watch column, you'll know that this is a rule I identified early on. In the jury's eyes, certain game genres are ruled out of GOTY contention wholesale, and racing games are one of them.

This could be because The Game Awards has a genre category to recognize these games in (Best Sports/Racing Game), but then, that's also true of genres which always fare well in Game of the Year, like role-playing games and action-adventures. It could be because racing games are considered niche and aren't widely played among the jury, although in the case of the genre's two biggest series — Forza Horizon and Mario Kart — I would find that hard to believe.

My guess is that there's a kind of cultural bias here, a feeling racing games lack the substance that would make for a game of the year. In the minds of the jury, these games can be technically excellent, but they lack a human, storytelling dimension that elevates them to the peak of the artform.

I do think Forza Horizon 6 stands a better chance of being recognized in the Game of the Year field than any previous racing game, though. I don't think it can win, even if Grand Theft Auto 6 wasn't coming out this year. But I wouldn't rule out a nomination quite as confidently as I would have previously thought.

Image: Playground Games/Xbox Game Studios

There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, things have broken Forza Horizon 6's way. So far this year, almost every potential GOTY contender has had some kind of asterisk against it: Pokémon Pokopia is handicapped by its genre and brand, Crimson Desert was unloved by critics, Saros is both too hardcore and not hardcore enough, Mixtape has been sullied by toxic debate, and so on. Only Resident Evil Requiem's record looks clean, though with a sub-90 Metascore, it's not quite as clean as you would want.

This doesn't mean 2026 will be an uncompetitive year. GTA 6 aside, strong prospects like The Blood of Dawnwalker and Control Resonant lie ahead. Arguably, Forza Horizon 5 faced weaker opponents. But Horizon 5 launched in November, just before the eligibility deadline for The Game Awards. Horizon 6 has months of clear air in which to establish a narrative that it is the game of the early part of the year.

Secondly, it's just phenomenally popular. Even assuming Forza Horizon 6's Xbox audience hasn't grown, it is already an order of magnitude bigger on Steam than its predecessor. This kind of broad embrace always helps a game's chances and keeps it in the conversation — and a PS5 release later this year will serve as a handy reminder for the jury.

Thirdly, and most importantly, there's something a little different about Forza Horizon 6: its Japanese setting. There's obviously a deep cultural connection between Japan and the video games community, and Playground Games has lavished this area of the game with love, seeding it with deep and considered references to Initial D, Gundam, and other facets of Japanese life and pop culture.

It's still not as if Forza Horizon 6 has a moving story (and it would be a much worse game if it did). But Playground's treatment of Japan gives it an emotional resonance and broad cultural surface that its predecessors didn't have. It elevates it; it makes it feel like more than just a car game in a pretty location.

There are still many obstacles to Forza Horizon 6 securing a nomination, not least among them an in-house competitor in the form of Playground's Fable. But I hope it does, and not just because I love racing games. The broader The Game Awards casts the net for Game of the Year, the better a representation of this fabulously diverse artform it will be.

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