Game pirates generally expect their life to be made more difficult by developers and publishers keen to make sure their years of hard work are not easily uploadable and playable to all and sundry with a copy of qbittorrent installed.
Much-reviled DRM systems such as Denuvo have been inserted into games by companies such as Sega and Capcom and have kept certain games out of Blackbeard’s clutches at the expense of the experience of those who actually pay to play them, who have had to put up with seemingly impacted frame rates and always-on restrictions.
Other companies have just said, “whatever” and released their games, hoping that once people realise how good they are, many would use a pirated copy as a “demo” and then hope they would buy the game after playing it.
The thing to bear in mind is that not everybody who pirates a game would ever purchase it, but the impact can still be devastating for a game’s bottom line.
So then, the last thing you want to do as a dev is accidentally upload an unprotected pre-load version to Steam, which people can hurriedly download and crack. This is what seems to have happened over the weekend, when Forza Horizon 6 has seemingly seeped into the wild, well ahead of its launch next week.
Generally, pirated PC games only turn up after launch, and it is only Nintendo games that tend to arrive on the torrent sites ahead of their release date. mainly due to the fact that physical copies have to be distributed to stores in advance.
Forza Horizon 6 is definitely out there, as screenshots and videos are already beginning to appear online. It clearly is not the absolute final version, as there are still reported issues, ones that would probably be sorted by the inevitable Day One patch.
As yet, there has been no comment from Microsoft, and, while mistakes happen, it will be hugely frustrating as the first major game launch since the sea change at the helm of Microsoft’s gaming division.
Authored by
Paul McNally
Paul McNally has been around consoles and computers since his parents bought him a Mattel Intellivision in 1980. He has been a prominent games journalist since the 1990s, spending over a decade as editor of popular print-based video games and computer magazines, including a market-leading PlayStation title. Paul has written high-end gaming content for GamePro, Official Australian PlayStation Magazine, PlayStation Pro, Amiga Action, Mega Action, ST Action, GQ, Loaded, and the The Mirror. He has also hosted panels at retro-gaming conventions and can regularly be found guesting on gaming podcasts and Twitch shows. Believing that the reader deserves actually to enjoy what they are reading is a big part of Paul’s ethos when it comes to gaming journalism, elevating the sites he works on above the norm.
