PlayStation and Guerrilla Games’ Horizon franchise has surpassed 38 million copies sold, a milestone quietly revealed amid the former’s ongoing legal dispute with Tencent’s upcoming Light of Motiram.
This news comes from a line of text tucked away within Sony’s recently filed lawsuit against the Chinese technology conglomerate, which reads: “The Horizon franchise is immensely successful and widely distributed. The Horizon franchise has sold over 38m copies globally. There would be no question that Tencent had access to the Horizon franchise when it created Light of Motiram, even if it had not expressly approached [Sony] with a request to license [its] intellectual property rights in the franchise.”
Despite the current circumstances, this milestone is certainly a respectable one, especially considering that there are only two mainline games in the franchise thus far. The series kicked off in 2017 with the debut of Horizon Zero Dawn, which subsequently spawned a sequel, 2022’s Horizon Forbidden West, alongside a 2023 VR exclusive title, Horizon Call of the Mountain, and the 2024 kid-friendly spin-off Lego Horizon Adventures.
Both mainline titles were extremely well received, and while they were both initially PlayStation console exclusives, they were subsequently released on PC, with the first title also receiving a graphical remaster last year. The games largely centred on protagonist Aloy, an outcast of the primitive Nora tribe who ventures into the post-apocalyptic lands ravaged by mechanical beasts as she uncovers the truth behind her existence and fights to prevent the world from ending once more.
With this new milestone, the Horizon franchise is slowly making its mark as one of Sony’s best-selling IPs, although it’s still nowhere close to its other juggernaut franchise, Santa Monica’s God of War, with its 2018 reboot selling over 23 million units by the end of 2022 and its 2022 sequel, God of War Ragnarök, selling 11 million copies within the first three months of its launch, meaning that the rebooted franchise as a whole has to date sold much more than Horizon’s current milestone.
Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise “duds” like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3. He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying.
