Looks like Horizon Festival UK is packing up. Playground Games announced that Forza Horizon 4 will be delisted on December 15, 2024.
After December 15, the game and its DLCs will be removed from all digital stores as well as from Game Pass. Those who owned the game will continue to be able to play it.
If you play the game via Game Pass and purchased DLCs and are subscribed to Game Pass on June 25 you are eligible to a free game token, allowing you to continue playing the game as usual. It will be delivered via the Xbox Message Center.
As usual for racing games, the FAQ page cites “due to agreements with licensing and other partnerships ending” as the reason to delist Forza Horizon 4.
Online servers will remain online, for now, and the game will continue to have reruns of the Festival Playlist up Series 77, ending on August 22.
After the final Festival Playlist ends, all cars, including the “hard to find” reward cars only available from Festival Playlists, will be available for purchase at any time by using Backstage Passes.
Forza Horizon 4 launched in 2018 which brings the forever-festival of music and cars to Playground Games’ backyard in the UK. The game received active support up to 2021 with free post-launch update by way of new cars added to the Festival Playlist, as well as some selection of DLC. Two of which are expansion, including the one featuring Lego cars.
After Forza Horizon 5 launched, Forza Horizon 4 remains supported via Festival Playlist reruns– these are the same monthly events by cycled. No new content was added after June 2021.
All of previous Forza Horizon games prior to this title, alongside seven other Forza Motorsport games, have all been delisted from sale. A fate most racing games have as most of its content, like cars, tracks and music tracks, are licensed. And these license agreements expire over time.
Earlier this year, another racing game, The Crew, was delisted and its servers were shut down after 10 years being on sale. The servers being down meant that all legally purchased copies of The Crew have stopped working, as the game requires an active online connection to work. This sparked a consumerist movement called Stop Killing Games making efforts to stop game publishers from destroying video games players paid for.
Forza Horizon 4 has online features but can be played entirely offline, so at least when the time the servers do shut down, a version of the game remains playable in some form.
Source: Forza