Forza Horizon 6 Has Been Leaked a Week Early, After Accidental Unencrypted Steam Release

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's 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. This isn't the first time this has happened, either. Death Stranding 2 also saw a similar fate in March this year, with spoilers from the more story-focused game hitting the internet two days before the official release. Are you going to play Forza Horizon 6 at launch? (238 votes) Yes, I'll be playing on day one53% Yes, I'll check it out soon after launch11% Maybe, I'll wait for reviews9% No, I'll wait for the PS5 release21% No, I'm not really interested5% 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. It will be interesting to see if Valve takes any action to make this sort of accidental unencrypted release harder in future, as it would probably make sense for the backend to recognise unencrypted manifests and require a confirmation step or flag the potential consequences of pushing unencrypted files publicly before the game's release date and time has been reached.