Someone at Playground Games is having a rough week. The full PC version of Forza Horizon 6—all 155 gigabytes of it—leaked online over the weekend after an unencrypted build was mistakenly uploaded to Steam, giving pirates a nine-day head start on one of Xbox’s biggest releases of the year.By the time anyone noticed, the files were already spreading across piracy sites. Users on r/GamingLeaksAndRumours were among the first to flag the unencrypted files appearing on SteamDB, and it moved quickly from there—cracked, shared, and playable within hours. Screenshots followed. Then YouTube videos. Then Reddit guides on workarounds for the crashes that come with running a build that was never meant to ship in this state.
What went wrong on Steam
Steam preloads are standard practice. Publishers upload encrypted game files early so players can download them before launch day. A separate update then decrypts everything the moment the game officially goes live. The working theory here is that Playground uploaded both the files and the decryption together by mistake—effectively leaving the front door open. Microsoft has not confirmed this, and neither the publisher nor Playground Games has commented publicly.
Leak or Not, the Forza Horizon 6 is still selling
What’s notable is how little this seems to have hurt Forza Horizon 6 commercially. It currently sits as the second top-selling game by revenue on Steam and third on the wishlist charts. Most players, it turns out, aren’t willing to trade a working game for a crashy pirated build. The Premium Edition unlocks May 15 for early access, with the full release following on May 19—also landing day one on Game Pass.This is the second major Steam preload mishap in 2026. Death Stranding 2 had an almost identical incident in March, when 113GB of files leaked just days before launch. At some point, the industry might want to add an extra checkbox to that upload process.
