For Honor had a great time pre-release, enjoying a couple of smooth and successful betas, which happened to be among the most popular to date for Ubisoft, along with a good feeling for the game that translated into a strong launch. Unfortunately for the title, it seems to have started a downward journey from there, as its player base is rapidly disappearing just a few weeks after its launch, most notably on Steam, according to a report from GitHyp.
It made it into the top 10 most played games on Steam when it launched, with almost 46,000 players taking on the role of Knight, Samurai or Viking in the medieval fighting game. Fast forward a week however, and that number dropped to around 21,000 players, and forward another week, daily numbers we’re only reaching 15,000 players. This decline has been compared to that seen with The Division when it launched, another of Ubisoft’s titles.
It’s a sad sight to see, and it would be naive to assume the release of high scoring games such as Horizon Zero Dawn and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild within the last few weeks hasn’t had an impact. For Honor is a truly unique and detailed fighting experience, however this could be where it shoots itself in the foot; as we mentioned in our review, the game rewards those players who master the intricate combat mechanics, and will punish new or casual players who have not when placed in PvP matches. Perhaps players did not anticipate the level of skill or time required, in order to flourish at the multiplayer side of things. The peer-to-peer servers used for matchmaking also didn’t do the game any favours, with many players reporting constant connection issues whilst in queues or playing online matches.
Ubisoft tried to remedy the situation, offering players a 3-Day Champion Status last weekend to apologise for the global outage that happened the weekend before. It offered numerous XP boosts, emblems and extra loot, and saw the best weekend the game has had at 17,000 players, however still down 56% from launch. Given The Division had lost 57% of its players by the third week on Steam, the report suggests that Ubisoft will need to start slashing the price of the game, or release new content, in order to bring back players, otherwise it is staring at a possible drop of 90% down at the end of its second month since launch. There was no word on how the other platforms were holding up in terms of numbers, so hopefully it’s a better story than on Steam.
