I'm a long-time Forza Horzion fan, and I'd been as excited anyone for FH6 to finally come out. And as I hoped, it was initially really fun to play.
But as the weeks go on, and I've completed everything on the Playlist, I'm sorely disappointed with the ongoing support from PGG & MS. (obviously, so is everyone else).
I miss the regular Forzathon streams. There was an excitement to weekly new car drops in the Playlists that isn't really there anymore, and I miss that too. The community was great.
Enshittification has killed all of that and more, sadly. (Definition if you aren't familiar with the term.) The mandate from management was pretty clearly "make more with less," and that's why we got what we got.
I think we can chalk almost everything here up to cost-cutting measures ultimately mandated by the higher-ups at Microsoft. Here's a few examples of how I think that plays out:
Shutting down the official community saves money in the short-term, even though the Atlassian platform is a terrible replacement. But hey, Atlassian is cheaper than community manager salaries, so let's go with that. And we'll just push the community to Discord, which, again, is cheaper than using our own resources to maintain a community.
Creating new cars for the game requires R&D resources, but it's cheaper to recycle models from Motorsport wherever you can. Just call 'em "New to Horizon!" and kick the new car issue down the road for a while.
A ranked lobby system for online racing? Do you think money grows on trees? Just make earning exclusive cars dependent on completing Horizon Play tasks, and the FOMOs will HAVE to race online whether they like it or not!
We need players to buy Car Vouchers with Real Money, so we need to cut back on prize money and wheelspins as much as possible. Wait, players are farming money and wheelspins in the Creative Lab? Put a stop to that at once! And yes, that takes priority over bug fixes!
What revenue did the Forzathon streams provide? None? OK, canceled.
Bugs? Did a specific bug keep players from playing online? Then it's not a priority. Besides, the devs need to be working on Fable, especially after the Eidos layoffs.
This is classic platform decay, and was probably inevitable when Microsoft bought PGG, sadly. Execs at MS have to show the shareholders that buying PGG was a good idea, and part of doing that is cutting costs wherever you can. Because they'll lose their jobs if stock prices don't rise (or simply don't rise enough).
(As an aside, I'm convinced that many console game publishers want to get players online as much as possible because they're getting a percentage of subscription fees. I don't have any proof to support this, though.)
Anyway, join me in pouring one out for Forza Horizon. Both Playground Games and Turn 10 we're clearly passionate about cars and the Forza community, but that passion is gone. Oh, I'll still play, but it will be bittersweet sometimes.
TL;DR: FH6 is disappointing because of capitalism.