MLB: The Show 26 is performing better than, well, most of the American League at this point, finishing sixth in unit sales among games in the U.S., with Forza Horizon 6 at No. 2 for Microsoft in tracking firm Circana’s monthly report for May.
Since its March launch, Sony’s baseball sim is seeing its sales trend “slightly higher than a year ago through May,” said Circana’s Executive Director/Games Mat Piscatella. It’s also “slightly overperforming MLB: The Show 25 on a time-aligned basis” and is “on pace to set a new record high in full-game dollar sales should this trend continue.” It’s also No. 3 in overall game sales for the year.
Microsoft has seen a lot of bad news for its game division: recent layoffs and more looming in the near-future while cutting projects left and right. So a “great start” for Forza Horizon 6 must be welcome news in Redmond, Wash. Piscatella said “launch-month full-game dollar sales of Forza 6 were approximately 30% higher than the launch-month full-game dollar sales of Forza Horizon 5,” with it being particularly strong on PC.
2K Sports’ WWE 2K25 is also seeing strong sales this year, coming in at No. 9 overall for 2026 through May. Piscatella noted that “this franchise has been remarkably consistent over the past four years in particular.”
Console sales, sports games and 2026
May was another rough month for PlayStation and Xbox console sales. While Nintendo’s Switch 2 finished its first 12 months in the U.S. as the second-fastest-selling console in Circana’s tracking history at 5.9 million systems (trailing only the Game Boy Advance’s 6.5 million handheld sales in one year), PlayStation hardware sales fell to its lowest since May 2000, and Xbox sales were its lowest ever recorded for May. This comes on the heels of price increases for both consoles as AI’s hunger for memory and other components drives up the costs of consumer electronics across industries.
Considering how many sports game sales come on PlayStation and Xbox — with machines that should be at the end of their normal life cycles and no new consoles on the horizon (and even so, they would be quite expensive thanks to the hunger of AI) — I asked Piscatella if this should be a concern for companies making sports games.
“Beyond everything else they’re worrying about? I don’t know. And I’m not sure if it’s a sports game challenge in particular,” Piscatella said. “But there’s no doubt that higher prices on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series hardware have had a negative impact on hardware sales. Fortunately for those two systems, we are already deep into the console cycle, so many people who were interested in buying either have already done so.
“The bigger question is the next generation in terms of what it looks like, when it will arrive and how much it will cost. Sports games continue to perform well in the market at the moment, and in some ways, it should remain a more insulated genre than perhaps some others. We’ll have to see what happens to Switch 2 hardware sales once those price changes take effect later this year.”
