Forza Motorsport Keeps Improving, but Is It Too Little Too Late?

After almost three months, players are still seemingly unsatisfied with Forza Motorsport. If we look at the game's Steam page, the 38% "Mostly Negative" score hasn't budged one bit. Even worse, in the last month, new players gave it an even lower score at 35%.

SteamDB, a popular statistics website, says Forza Motorsport's all-time player peak was 4,703 during its release. Only 665 people are playing it at the time of writing, with a 24-hour peak of 861 players.

On Twitch, it's not doing any better, either. It only has 57 viewers on a Sunday afternoon, with a 24-hour peak of 852 viewers. The all-time peak was 37,155, according to the website. It doesn't take an industry analyst to figure out the game's in trouble. Granted, it's free on Xbox and PC Game Pass, and the majority of people are playing it there, but that doesn't change the overall story.

However, on the brighter side, Turn 10 is doing its best to course-correct things. The team is listening to the community's wants and needs, and you can see that's true in the primary content updates they drop. So far, they've had five main updates.

Update 5 arrives sometime in February with improvements to Car Progression, Forza Race Regulations, and Drivatar AI, three main areas filled with problems and sorrows.

According to their blog post, in the Car Progression Area, Update 5 lets you equip car parts no matter your car level. Forza Race Regulations has race marshals enabled now, along with select content creators that can flag in-game incidents for future review. Drivatar AI has been tweaked so some opponents stop ramming into you while others gain unbeatable leads. Turn 10 is doing more AI testing.

Next, a pivotal annoyance is being removed, and thank the Lord above for this! The Skip Practice option will finally be available in the Career mode pre-race menu. Quality of life improvements are set to arrive in the Livery Editor, letting you zoom in when you apply decals.

Aside from these significant issues, Update 5 will also fix general stability problems and other bugs from Photo Mode, replays, general gameplay, Livery Editor, PC as a platform, wheels, graphics, AI, some cars, tracks, and accessibility mode.

These all seem fine and dandy, but will it be enough to course-correct Forza Motorsport and bring it back to its former glory? Rumors of Gran Turismo 7 coming to PC in 2024 are starting to pile up. If it indeed arrives this year, it could be the final nail in the coffin for Xbox's track-based sim.