If you're predicting Forza to flop based on the fact it has Hoonigan content you obviously don't realize how popular Hoonigan is.
I personally don't care for most of them, but I realize why they are in the game and have no issue with them
It's interesting, really. Apparently, it's no longer allowed to speak ill of Forza Horizon anywhere but in Turn 10's forums or YouTube comment sections, where the angry teens congregate.
It's also a shame that people need to twist words to criticize something, as I never stated that a future entry in the franchise would flop "because" of Hoonigan's cars.
With Game Pass, Microsoft has eliminated the very concept of "flop". Let's take Crackdown 3 for example. It's a good, underrated game. It's nowhere nearly as bad as some people are making it out to be. But, at $60 a key and no "über-realistic" graphics nor "compelling" story, it would never reach as many players as it did if Game Pass did not exist. Therefore, a Forza Horizon 5 can never "flop" in the traditional sense.
I'm speaking more along the lines of the concept simply reaching its peak and starting to nosedive. People tend to get bored of things if they don't change often enough. Playground is approaching the limit of what they can do with the game, and fast. None of the things they added to 4 are truly groundbreaking. Not the stories, not the seasons, not the Route Creator, not the individual skill system. The map is better, the car roster is generally better, and that's it.
The thing is, yes, it has millions of players and has attained a level of protection around it that Forza Motorsport for example used to have in the days of FM4 and lost. Underneath the pretty skin, however, you have things like:
- Team Adventure being a complete failure
- Creation Contests rewarding plain bad designs
- A download system that favors whoever put it there first rather than quality work
- An Auction House vulnerable to cartels
- Exclusive cars concept which hurts debugging and content availability for these cars
- Unresolved issues such as poor backwards compatibility with designs created before the wheel paint update
- Wheelspins that don't compensate you for winning dozens of useless duplicate cars
- Poor range of cosmetics and cumbersome way to acquire them
- Emotes
- Repetitive Forzathon Live that just gets in the way once you have enough exclusive content
- FE cars made worthless due to minimum buyout being lower and availability being higher
- S1 and S2 classes have high enough requirements that push the game even more into arcade territory
- Fundamentally flawed AI engineered to make you lose with overpowered lead cars and a nag screen to force you to race on a higher difficulty for little monetary benefit
- Trials and Playground Games being shoved down our throats when they're no fun to play
- Limited sound samples and poor artistic choices for many cars
- Visible LOD transitions on trees and buildings even on Xbox One X and even worse in Performance mode
- Fortune Island all but abandoned since release with no new events nor content whatsoever
- Car Pass littered with remastered cars and variants of existing cars rather than new content
The introduction of new road cars and stock cars being slowed down in favor of these customs like Hoonigan, DeBerti and (possibly) Guntherwerks is either a good or a bad thing depending on what you like, but I'm convinced that, given the choice, most would pick a Huracán Performante over a Hoonigan RS200, even more so considering you can build an RS200 yourself in the game. The Hoonigan version is just a cosmetic variant with an OP physics file. The Performante on the other hand at least looks better than a regular Huracán with the Forza aero kit.
Forza Horizon remains unparalleled in driving pleasure due to borrowing the ForzaTech engine from Forza Motorsport but in the volatile gaming market it doesn't take much for a franchise to fall from grace like Need for Speed for example did. PUBG was all the rage in 2017, then Fortnite was molded into a battle royale game with more stable performance, better optimization and no exclusivity on consoles, so it became the standard in battle royale play while PUBG lags behind Apex Legends in third place these days.
The prize crate rumors, real or fake, forced Turn 10 into defensive mode with FM7, a stance they haven't left yet. The reason why Forza Horizon's competitors are weak right now is due to stubbornness from their owners with regards to design choices rather than inability to make something that could match or even surpass it.
I remember when NFS was the top dog in arcade racing and there were plenty of games at the time that did many things better than NFS, they just didn't have the name nor the recognition. With Forza Horizon, it's more difficult, but it could still happen. After all, T10's continued blunders with FM7 and earlier allowed the rebirth of Gran Turismo as a household simcade name and, even as a fan of Forza, I have to admit Forza Motorsport is playing catch up right now, which would be unthinkable as late as 4 years ago.
