Clubs were once an integral part to the online section of gameplay for many people that played the old Forza games, since the very first Horizon, people came together in Clubs to group themselves with people they share interests with, build teams up within the game or simply wear the tag of the person they look up to.
This feature withered with the abandonment of Xbox Social features around 2022-2023 sadly, with the feature being sidelined for and will now be completely cut from Forza Horizon 6 as well by the sounds of the announcement, which is incredibly disappointing to me as it was a simple way of allowing groups to find together within the game in my opinion.
Why do i personally believe that clubs are important:
- Social Aspect:
Clubs promoted people getting together around their interests, like Fast and Furious, Skylines, Kei cars, Pokémon and others.
Clubs also allowed people who share something in common to group together, like being fans of AR12 or Don Joewon Song or others; being German, Polish, French, Brazlian, Argentinian, Iowan, etc.
Those tags also added a sense of belonging for people, like they had a group behind them that would be there to race, do Forzathon Live/Horizon Arcades/other Freeroam social features, group together for other shenanegans, etc.
- Easy grouping of teams within the game for visibility by others (like for tune sheets)*
Especially useful for subgroups in Forza like “Team Wars”, but it’d allow people to have an easy view on who is together as a group within a race and what team they represent (ex. [1%]), which helps with visibility for others outside of the “Forzasphere” and people who are not that involved in it.
The grouping also built communities that are still active today as well though (as someone from the “newer guard”, i can only think of Apex Racing at the moment, but there are definitely other examples that exist), which will have trouble keeping their people together unless they keep their communities going outside of the game (like again, Discord).
- Club Leaderboard
Having friendly competition that isn’t tied to sources outside the game (like Discord) was a nice feature that allowed people to see who is active and who isn’t and allowed people to have a friendly competition that increases the amount of time played by people within the game to try and get #1 on the leaderboard. Which benefits the statistics of the game in the end while also giving the players of the game something to work towards each month.
Addendum: The removal of clubs also means that people who would want to show their allegiance to a new team are now forced to pay the gamertag changing fee every time they perform the action, while also limiting their character choice to 8/7 characters (3/4 for the club tag + 1 space character, with a limit of 12 characters), which would make it harder for people to have different names in the system (26^7 as opposed to 26^12, with a lot of nonsense strings thrown out as well (like aaaaaaa and zzzzzzz for 26^7)).
