Popular racing game series Forza Horizon developed by Playground games/Microsoft accidentally got leaked online on May 10 2026, 9 days before official release.

How it happened

On May 10th, as part of their normal preloading patch for Steam, Playground games pushed out a build for their upcoming release; this is a very normal thing for most games on Steam to reduce waiting times for players on release day and to have everything ready to go. What wasnt normal though was that the build they pushed out was completely unencrypted, 155 GB of the full game was available to be downloaded.

Impact and spread

Within hours, the game was cracked to work without needing Steam or Game pass and circulated to various torrent websites, then people started making short clips and videos about it on Youtube and gaming leaks subreddits as well. Playground games caught wind of this and players started getting banned left and right for “cheating/unallowed modding”. Microsoft also reportedly started issuing copyright strikes to Youtube channel that were streaming/posting clips of the full game.

It remains to be seen if this was actually intentional or not and I say this due to the fact that a lot companies do this as a marketing stunt to drive sales and hype but if you ask me it seems this was good ol human stupidity.