Forza Horizon 6 Lands Two Golden Joystick 2026 Nominations, Misses PC Game of the Year

The game has been out on Xbox Series X|S and PC since May, so this is a useful check on how Microsoft's biggest first-party racer is doing with players. The full lineup also shows a gap that PC players will likely notice.

The two nominations​

Best Visual Design. OtakuKart's report lists the other nominees in this category as CONTROL Resonant, Orbitals, Phonopolis, Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, and SAROS. That field includes very different kinds of games. A realistic open-world racer is up against stylised and experimental titles, so this category is about visual identity as much as raw rendering quality.

Console Game of the Year. This is a crowded field of ten. The nominees are 007: First Light, Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave, Forza Horizon 6, LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, Nioh 3, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, Pokémon Pokopia, PRAGMATA, Resident Evil Requiem, and SAROS. Housemarque's SAROS appears in both of the same categories as Forza Horizon 6, so the two games meet twice.

The shortlist was published on September 25. According to Tech Insider, the organisers revealed nominees for the first 21 publicly voted categories on September 25, 2026, according to GamesRadar.

Summary: Forza Horizon 6 has two nominations. It faces six-way competition in Best Visual Design and ten-way competition in Console Game of the Year, with SAROS in both.

Not in PC Game of the Year​

Forza Horizon 6 launched on PC and Xbox on the same day, through both the Microsoft Store and Steam. Even so, it does not appear in PC Game of the Year. The ten PC nominees are Big Walk, Crimson Desert, Escape from Tarkov, Esoteric Ebb, MECCHA CHAMELEON, Mewgenics, Order of the Sinking Star, STAR WARS Zero Company, The Blood of Dawnwalker, and Valheim.

Players have noticed. One ResetEra commenter wrote that it was funny how Onimusha, Forza Horizon 6, Pragmata, Resonance and not least 007 First Light aren't nominated on PC. That is one forum post, not a trend. Still, it shows the pattern: most of the big multiplatform releases were placed in the console category, and the PC shortlist leans toward PC-first, early-access and indie games. The awards have not explained publicly how games are assigned to categories, so it would be guesswork to call this a snub.

This matters because Playground put real work into the PC version. Its March 2026 PC feature lists:

• Ray-traced reflections on cars and scenery, plus ray-traced global illumination for indirect lighting and occlusion, on compatible graphics cards
• NVIDIA DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation on RTX 50-series GPUs, DLSS Frame Generation on RTX 40-series and newer, and DLSS Super Resolution on all GeForce RTX cards, along with DLAA and NVIDIA Reflex
• AMD FSR 4 or FSR 3, depending on the GPU, and Intel XeSS 2.1
• 4K HDR, ultrawide support, uncapped frame rates, graphics changes that apply without a restart, live previews for many settings, real-time readouts of video and system memory use, and a built-in benchmark mode

Playground also notes that actual performance depends on your hardware, background tasks, settings, ray tracing and upscaler choice. Ray tracing is only available on compatible GPUs, so the full visual package depends on what is in your PC. None of this tells us why the game was nominated for Best Visual Design. It does show what PC players can switch on.

Summary: The game is nominated for Console Game of the Year but not PC Game of the Year, despite a well-featured PC version. The awards have not said why.

What Playground built​

The nominations are for a game that Playground describes in big terms. Its January announcement calls Japan the largest map in any Horizon game so far, with varied biomes, a lot of vertical terrain, seasonal changes, and both rural and urban areas. The studio says its Tokyo City is five times the size of Forza Horizon 5's Guanajuato and includes suburbs, downtown streets, docks and industrial zones. These are the developer's own comparisons, not independent measurements.

Playground also says it sent the team to Japan to gather reference material, including time-lapses of real skies, photogrammetry of trees and geology, and scans of roads and buildings. For a visual design nomination, that research is relevant background.

Other confirmed launch details:

• More than 550 cars at launch, updated Forza Aero, liveries that can be painted on windows, and body kits for selected cars
• A new R performance class for track-focused cars, cosmetic tyre wear, and steering animations with up to 540 degrees of wheel rotation
• Launched May 19, 2026 on Xbox Series X|S and PC, with Premium Edition early access from May 15
• Included with Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass, and playable through Xbox Cloud Gaming
• A PS5 version announced for "later this year," with no firm date in Playground's official material

That last point affects the Console Game of the Year race. Most of the game's players so far are on Xbox and PC, while the category is open to fans of every console.

Summary: Playground calls the Japan map and its Tokyo City the biggest in the series. The game is on Xbox and PC through Game Pass now, and the PS5 version has no date yet.

Voting dates​

The Golden Joystick Awards describe themselves as the longest-running public-voted games awards. They started in 1983 and this is their 44th year. The organiser says the 2025 edition drew 21 million public votes. Last year, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won Best Visual Design and Ghost of Yōtei won Console Game of the Year.

The 2026 dates:

1. Now until October 23: Voting in the current categories closes on Friday, October 23, 2026, at 4 p.m. PT/7 p.m. ET/midnight BST, according to Outrun Gaming.
2. October 26–30: A separate vote for Ultimate Game of the Year. According to iXBT.games, the list of nominees in this category will be announced later. The two nominations do not guarantee Forza Horizon 6 a place on that shortlist.
3. Jury prizes: FullCleared reports that the Breakthrough, Critics' Choice and Streamers' Choice awards are selected by a panel of journalists from GamesRadar+, PC Gamer, Future Games Show, Edge, Knowledge, and Retro Gamer.
4. November 11: The winners are announced at the London ceremony, which is also livestreamed.

Outlets disagree on the top nomination counts. GamesRadar+ says 007 First Light and Big Walk have five nominations each, while FullCleared reports six nominations each, followed by Resident Evil Requiem with four. Either way, Forza Horizon 6 is not among the most-nominated games, but it is one of the best-known names on the list.

Future's Daniel Dawkins, content director for the awards, said "no single game dominates the field, this is one of our most open and unpredictable years yet". Because the awards are decided by public vote, that should help a game with a large Game Pass audience. It will not help much in Best Visual Design, where the competing games have very distinctive art styles.

Summary: Voting in the current categories closes October 23. The Ultimate Game of the Year vote runs October 26–30, and winners are named November 11.

What it means for Xbox​

For Microsoft, the nominations add to the case that Forza Horizon 6 is one of Xbox's key releases of 2026. It sells both Game Pass and the PC platform. Two things are worth watching over the next six weeks:

• Ultimate Game of the Year: whether the game makes the shortlist once nominations open.
• The PS5 release: whether it arrives before the next round of awards eligibility.

If you've played it on Xbox or PC, you can vote. Just check the clock first: the deadline is midnight in the UK, which is earlier in the day in North America.