Guerrilla's Horizon Forbidden West game has sold over 8.4 million units, as announced today in a blog post, while franchise lifetime sales are at 32.7 million, meaning Horizon Zero Dawn has surpassed 24 million sales to date.
That doesn't even count for initiatives like Play at Home (which Sony launched during the COVID lockdowns) or when the games were added to the PlayStation Plus library.
It's a massive success story for the 20-year-old Dutch studio, once known for the Killzone sci-fi first-person shooter franchise. While Guerrilla worked on many more Killzone games, it never reached the critical or commercial success garnered with Horizon. This likely explains why the franchise is now being expanded with an online co-op project and a live action TV adaptation (in addition to the inevitable single player sequel).
The second entry in the franchise, Horizon Forbidden West, debuted on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 in February 2022, five years after Zero Dawn's original launch. I rated it 9 out of 10 in my review:
Horizon Zero Dawn rightfully propelled Guerrilla much higher than Killzone ever did with regards to both critical reception and commercial success; the question, though, was whether they could replicate this with Horizon Forbidden West.
After playing the sequel almost non-stop for the past two weeks, my answer is that it was no fluke. The developers have managed to craft yet another game that's just as captivating as the original, proceeding to make it bigger and better, even though there's no major open world innovation to be found genre-wise.
Horizon Forbidden West is literally brimming with content. According to the PS5, I've finished the game after exactly 70 hours of playtime. Guerrilla's developers were a bit coy on the topic of longevity pre-release, suggesting that the game would be about as long as Zero Dawn, but that was really underselling it, given that data from HowLongToBeat reveals the first game (without the Frozen Wilds expansion) could be completed to 100% in just 60 hours. Meanwhile, in Horizon Forbidden West, I've still got over twenty tasks left to do between side quests, errands (briefer side missions), and other types of content.
In late April, Guerrilla Games also released Burning Shores, a story DLC only available for PlayStation 5 that opens up the Los Angeles area for exploration. A PC version containing Horizon Forbidden West and Burning Shores will likely be released in the coming months, opening up the game to a new audience and sales, just like with Zero Dawn.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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