283,075 concurrent players on Steam. Six million players total across Xbox and PC. The #1 top seller on Steam at $69.99 a pop. A 92 on Metacritic — highest-rated game of the year so far.

And 86% positive on Steam user reviews. Good. Not great.

Forza Horizon 6 is, by every quantitative measure, an absolute monster. Playground Games’ open-world racer launched May 18 and immediately shattered the Xbox Game Studios concurrent player record on Steam, edging out Halo Infinite’s free-to-play multiplayer by roughly 500 players, according to Pure Xbox — except Forza did it at full price, and hundreds of thousands more paid $120 for early access. On Twitch, it peaked at nearly 99,000 viewers. Over 1,300 channels were streaming it simultaneously. Racing games don’t do numbers like this.

But pull up the Steam review page and the temperature shifts. “Very Positive” — 16,520 green thumbs up, 2,585 red thumbs down out of 19,105 total reviews. That’s a strong majority. It’s also a full tier below “Overwhelmingly Positive,” the designation tentpole PC launches often chase.

The Bugs and the Online Problem

The top-voted negative review pulls no punches after 11 hours of playtime. “This game is really buggy so far, and they need to fix the online races,” the player wrote. “The online races in this game are so stupid as soon as you slightly tap a wall you instantly lose 2 places to people due to a somewhat drift tap. So be prepared to want to strangle someone.”

Online instability and wall-penalty complaints appear repeatedly in negative reviews. For a game built around its social festival fantasy — a huge open world with multiplayer events, convoy systems, and competitive racing — janky netcode isn’t a minor grievance. It’s a core feature failing at launch.

Critics vs. Players

Here’s where it gets interesting.

Professional critics are glowing. IGN gave it a 10/10. Eurogamer gave it a 10/10. Game Informer: 9.25. Gamespot: 8/10. Polygon notes that the game sits at a 91 on Opencritic and a 92 on Metacritic, “aggregate scores that are just about identical with the last three games in the series.”

PC Gamer’s 84/100 review captures the tension most honestly. “It’s another Forza Horizon, for all its faults, but also its many, many triumphs,” the reviewer wrote, calling it “a game of small, marginal changes” elevated by its Japanese setting — Shibuya Crossing, Mount Fuji, winding touge mountain roads.

The critical consensus: the formula still works. The player consensus: yeah, but fix the bugs.

The Noise in the Numbers

There’s another factor dragging the percentage down, and it has nothing to do with gameplay. One of the top-voted positive reviews — 49.5 hours played — spends more words complaining about pronoun options than praising the game. “L for the pronoun option,” the reviewer wrote. “Keep the woke [expletive] out of games.”

This is the culture-war tax on user review aggregates in 2026. A chunk of negative and mixed reviews aren’t reviewing the racing at all — they’re rating a character customization menu. It inflates the negative column without saying anything meaningful about whether the driving is fun.

The Legs Question

Forza Horizon 6 is winning on volume. Six million players in under a week, bolstered by Xbox Game Pass and massive Steam adoption, is a colossal launch. The 33.6% concurrent player surge between tracking periods suggests word of mouth is still pulling people in, not pushing them away.

But 86% — with 2,585 negative reviews accumulating fast — means Playground has work to do. The negative reviews cluster around real, fixable problems: online stability, collision bugs, and minor technical rough edges. The critical ceiling is proven. The player experience hasn’t caught up.

For a franchise this dominant, the question isn’t whether Forza Horizon 6 is good. It’s whether a launch this big, with reviews this mixed, can maintain momentum long enough for patches to close the gap — or whether it peaks early and settles into “good enough” while players wait for the next one.

The game everyone’s playing. The game not everyone’s loving. That gap is where Forza Horizon 6 lives right now.

Sources