For Honor’s Active Player Count Is Ubisoft’s Fastest Drop on Steam
It’s no secret that Ubisoft’s For Honor had a rocky launch. It’s also no secret that even after launch, developers faced a series of complaints from the active playerbase. And that escalated to new heights in April when players decided to boycott the game. But now, via githyp, we know For Honor’s playerbase has dropped by 95%, an all-time low for the company.
The numbers reflect the player count currently on Steam. And these numbers now match up with Ubisoft’s count of Xbox One and PS4 players. While the game did demonstrate potential and strong appeal with its Twitch campaign, the playerbase started at a significantly smaller count than The Division, which debuted with 113K players.
As for the actual numbers, For Honor’s peak player activity reached 71,748, and now rests at an average 3.4K peak every 24 hours. This is very telling, considering the all-time peak was during the beta. At launch, the player count was actually 45,836, dropping 36%.
Chart brought to us via githyp.
For whatever reason, For Honor didn’t seem to resonate with the players. It may be that the lack of dedicated servers turned gamers off to the new IP. Moreover, a handful of glitches and bugs, along with persistent connectivity issues made the game less appealing. Afterward, players were more dismayed by the glaring pay-to-win economy that placed thousands of players at a competitive disadvantage. Since For Honor is a multiplayer-focused IP, this was considered unforgivable. Hence the aforementioned boycott. Players couldn’t hope to receive in-game items at a healthy rate thanks to the currency system, not without spending real money at least.
Thanks to the newest Season 2 launch of ‘Shadow and Might,‘ player activity did spike by about 2K per hour. One month later, however, numbers have returned to the low average.
Did you play For Honor? What are your thoughts on the game’s apparent popularity? Let us know in the comments below. Recently, Ubisoft did manage to reinvigorate activity in its older franchise, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege. Maybe they’ll be able to do the same with current online franchises, assuming they aren’t stretching themselves thin. Until next time,
Happy gaming.