[STEAM] Pirates are already playing Forza Horizon 6 days before its launch

[Steam 0]

Playable copies of

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

's Forza Horizon 6 have appeared on game piracy sites more than a week before the game's official launch, the apparent result of a mistake in uploading the game's files to Steam over the weekend.

Since the early days of Steam, players have been able to

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

well ahead of release so the game is ready to play when the encryption key is released on launch day. But early Sunday morning,

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

mistakenly uploaded roughly 155 GB of Forza Horizon 6 files to Steam in unencrypted form, as

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

by

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

.

That unprotected upload was noticed almost immediately

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

and

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

. Within hours,

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

's CrackWatch community was

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

that the game's copy protection had been broken, allowing for easy downloads of pirated versions across multiple piracy sites reviewed by Ars (while that initial CrackWatch post has since been "removed by

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

’s Legal Operations team," details of another crack

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

as of Monday morning).

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up