It has been announced that Forza Horizon 5 has ten million players making it the biggest first week not only in the history of Xbox, but also in the history of Xbox Game Pass. The problem is the game still feels like a ghost town.

For those unaware Forza Horizon 5, like many past game in the long franchise, has a heavy emphasis on connected play with ghosts of players appearing in your game constantly. These players can then be driven up to play one of the many multiplayer modes, casually race, participate in events and much more.

The problem is that server issues have left Forza Horizon 5 looking like a ghost town. Collectively here at the Hypertext office we’ve poured a lot of time into the game but the number of players seen in the game at any one time is still very low, most commonly countable on one hand.

This causes problems with many modes with the worst event being Horizon Arcade. Multiple times an hour a pink area will appear in the overworld of the game letting players know that a new Horizon Arcade is starting with the intention being that players can congregate on that point to play a series of games to earn points.

These points are crucially important for the Forzathon shop which usually has some of the best content in the game, and they become exponentially easier with more players.

We’ve not been able to complete a single Horizon Arcade since the public launch of the game due to server issues. In Forza Horizon 4, another title that we hundreds if not thousands of hours in, the Horizon Arcade worked flawlessly and even in less populated hours of the day it was a given that any random Horizon Arcade event would be packed with players and easy to complete.

It’s then a really irritant to see developer Playground Games and publisher Xbox Game Studios / Microsoft continually trump on about how many players this game has when basic functionality of multiplayer is still broken far after launch.

All of this is even more frustrating after a recent large patch ensured players that these problems were fixed. But don’t worry everyone, that patch was 100 percent successful in stopping certain player exploits that made some of the more stingy parts of the game economy better.

This is a real shame as Forza Horizon 5 is an impeccable game that is being tarnished by server and technical issues. We didn’t even have space in this single story to also complain about the stability issues, but those don’t seem to be affected by the 10 million players.