Forza Horizon 6 drops under 30,000 concurrent as the studio responds

Playground Games has answered complaints about Forza Horizon 6 after a long quiet stretch. The studio admitted the communication has been thin and that players are unhappy with the endgame, without naming a change or a date for one.

The launch looked very different. Press scores were high, and the Steam peak passed 300,000 people online at once. Later the concurrent count fell below 30,000. Over the same stretch, Forza Horizon 5's player count was moving the other way.

Players miss the streams and the back-and-forth. These days the studio mostly posts on the official blog. The esports side has nearly vanished, seasonal challenges get called repetitive, and new events are accused of barely using the Japan setting. Playground Games is also being reorganized and folded together with Turn 10 Studios.

A sharper fight is the wave of bans on player liveries, including itasha cars covered in anime characters. Copyright limits existed in earlier games, but a Horizon set in Japan made the scale harder to ignore. Players say even unpublished sketches by the artists themselves are getting hit. The studio denies that moderation is left entirely to AI, while also saying the rules are stricter and that penalties sometimes reach past the account. For now the statement reads as an offer to talk again, not a list of fixes.