By Francesco De Meo
Publication Date: 2026-05-11 10:56:00
Forza Horizon 6 is launching next week on PC and Xbox Series X|S, but a massive failure in Steamworks publishing leaked a fully playable build of the game without DRM. With the latest entry in the series being one of the biggest titles published by Xbox this year, the publisher is dealing with the situation in the harshest way possible, hitting users playing the leaked build with what essentially is a lifetime hardware ban.
As widely reported in now-deleted threads on the series’ official subreddit, early players are being suspended for “cheating/unallowed modding,” which was to be expected. The suspension that is getting handed out, however, is the harshest possible, as the unbanning date is December 31, 9999 – nearly 8,000 years from now.
Making this Forza Horizon 6 ban the harshest possible is the fact that it’s a Hardware ID (HWID) ban, meaning a simple Windows reinstall won’t reinstate the banned Xbox account on the banned system. “It…