One year ago when GitHyp launched, we featured an article covering how Ubisofts best-selling game ever, The Division, lost 93% of its playerbase in the span of its first 3 months. Now, 3 months after Ubisofts biggest launch of 2017, For Honor has surpassed one of 2016s biggest bombs by losing 95% of its playerbase on Steam.
As we originally reported, For Honor had a rough launch. Various issues lead to over half of the games population leaving within its first two weeks on Steam a number which aligned with Ubisofts own in-game player counts for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. And while For Honors playerbase started significantly smaller than The Divisions 113k peak, it followed the same trends which lead to us predicting yet another overhyped Ubisoft games downfall back in March.
Like many gamers, we were excited to get our hands on For Honors unique melee combat. Ubisofts multiplayer brawler seemed promising when the beta debuted at #1 on Twitch with a peak of 146k viewers. That interest, however, quickly faded as gamers got a taste of what the game had to offer and viewer counts dropped by 62% after the first week.
One of the early signs that For Honor might be in trouble was when the games official launch debuted with 36% less players than the beta. For Honors launch weekend peaked with 45k concurrent players, but the beta was much more successful with a peak of 71k players ranking the game as high as #3 on Steam.
Fans fed up with Ubisofts lack of support organized a boycott on April 3rd with the goal of receiving more communication from the developers. A quick response from Ubisoft at the time was enough to stop the blackout from having an impact on the player counts on that day. Yet, the devs continued level of support wasnt enough to prevent the games rapid decline.
Season 2 of For Honor introduced new heroes, maps, and gear on May 16th and helped the dying playerbase instantly jump from 2.2k players per hour to 4.7k pph. And although Ubisoft had hoped their big S2 Shadow and Might update would bring back more players, less than one month later the player counts are already close to where they were before the new season started.
As of Saturday, For Honors playerbase has dropped a staggering 95% to a peak of only 3.4k concurrent players. The more stable average players per hour metric has also dropped at the same rate going from 56k players per hour back in February down to 2.7k pph last weekend.
While this is yet another game to join the growing list of Ubisoft IPs with quick 90% or greater drop-offs, the publisher has found success recently with Rainbow Six: Siege. The competitive shooters new reduced price model combined with constant updates has resulted in its playerbase actually growing tremendously over the past year, which you can read more about in our analysis here.
