Forza Horizon 6 Has Been Leaked a Week Early, Playground Promises "Franchise-Wide" Hardware Bans for Pirates

Forza Horizon 6 was leaked online this weekend, with the game's unencrypted files, a crack and a DLC unlocker all available for download some four days ahead of the official early access release, and a week ahead of the game's May 19th public release.

It was originally thought that the game was mistakenly made available for pre-loading on Steam without the usual encryption that accompanies early releases, which allowed pirates to pull some 155GB of game files and begin cracking work early.

However, Playground Games has denied those reports, stating "this is not the result of a pre-load issue". The firm has gone on to promise "strict enforcement action" against anyone that plays the leaked build, including "franchise-wide" hardware-based bans.

Early impressions of Forza Horizon 6 from preview footage thus far have been broadly positive, so it's doubly unfortunate for series owners Microsoft that one of their tentpole releases may suffer reduced sales as a result of the early release on file sharing networks. There's also likely to be an impact on Game Pass subscriptions at a time where Microsoft's Xbox division badly needs to prove out the concept going forward.

The one silver lining here, if you can call it that, is that the Forza Horizon series isn't really intended to be played single-player, with a big focus on co-op and competitive activities as well as "ghost" cars from other players that make the world feel significantly more alive. Pirates playing the leaked version won't really be getting the full-fat release, and the prospect of long hardware and account bans should curtail experimentation somewhat.

What do you make of the news? Let us know in the comments below.