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For Honor lost 95% of its peak con player # on Steam, has ~25% of owners as 1/2 MAU

One year ago when GitHyp launched, we featured an article covering how Ubisoft’s best-selling game ever, The Division, lost 93% of its playerbase in the span of its first 3 months. Now, 3 months after Ubisoft’s biggest launch of 2017, For Honor has surpassed one of 2016’s 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 game’s population leaving within its first two weeks on Steam – a number which aligned with Ubisoft’s own in-game player counts for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. And while For Honor’s playerbase started significantly smaller than The Division’s 113k peak, it followed the same trends which lead to us predicting yet another overhyped Ubisoft game’s downfall back in March.

Like many gamers, we were excited to get our hands on For Honor’s unique melee combat. Ubisoft’s 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 game’s official launch debuted with 36% less players than the beta. For Honor’s 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 Ubisoft’s 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 dev’s continued level of support wasn’t enough to prevent the game’s 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 Honor’s 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 shooter’s 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.

Link. Article title is "For Honor Has Now Lost 95% Of Its Playerbase, Worse Than The Division 1 Year Ago" but that didn't fit.

Edit: Thanks Nirolak:

Here's the active in the last two weeks numbers for people who launch through Steam: http://steamspy.com/app/304390

Owners: 457,303 ± 21,090
Players in the last 2 weeks: 106,373 ± 10,176 (23.26%)
 
Was reading this earlier from Reddit. It's crazy as I thought it was doing well. Glad that I took a "wait and see" approach. I'd be interested in console numbers primarily though.
 

yurinka

Member
Just like any other 99.99% of the games 4 months after release? Shocking!

P.S.: It was the 2nd best selling game of Q1 2017. In the whole industry, not only Steam.

Ubisoft makes the best-selling games that everyone forgets about a week later.
Wrong. They announced record engament with titles like The Crew or Rainbow Six Siege, plus record numbers that improved YoY their previous record selling games from previous FY.
 
Bummer.

I played the Beta and it didn't quite click with me. Sounds like people it did click with have had microtransaction gripes.

It's really too bad, because even when they stumble, this is the kind of innovation i wish we'd see more of in AAA
 

Skyzard

Banned
A whole bunch of fighters came out recently. I played For Honor a lot more than I thought I would for months and am now interested in fighters again, playing Tekken 7.

But I'll be going back to For Honor after a while, there's nothing else like it and it's fantastic.
 

pa22word

Member
Just like any other 99.99% of the games 4 months after release? Shocking!

This post is pretty dumb considering ubisoft is chasing service based games as their future, and the game is basically a multi-player only game with a token sp mode.
 
I played it about a week. I've blind bought two digital games this gen, both Ubi titles, both regerts. This, and WD1. Both garbage.
 

Z3M0G

Member
This makes me sad because the game tried to do something new... and things like this scare off future attempts to try new things...

The game had some fantastic ideas. But where did it fail? Content? Execution?
 

Kai Dracon

Writing a dinosaur space opera symphony
I really like the game, but the awful network performance at launch was a brutal blow. I pretty much expected it would kill the player base overnight.
 
Great game with frequent balance updates but the servers/netcode are still largely garbage so I'm not surprised.


Steam though? Is it even on steam? Thought it was uplay exclusive on PC.
 
I always have to be careful with Ubisoft threads on GAF because of how misleading the titles or OPs tend to be. Wonder why that is.
 
Wasn't there also a large drop in Rainbow 6 Siege before Ubisoft turned it around? They need to stop this strategy of half-assing their multiplayer title launches in hopes that consumers will stick around long enough for them to correct them. Seems like a bad way to do things
 

Zyrox

Member
I'm currently occupied with T7 but I'll definitely return to For Honor once in a while, game is great and there's nothing else like it. Also kinda disingenuous title since those are only Steam numbers.
 

Theorry

Member
Was reading this earlier from Reddit. It's crazy as I thought it was doing well. Glad that I took a "wait and see" approach. I'd be interested in console numbers primarily though.

On Xbox its at #28 most played. So thats arround 12.000 peak players.
 

Fancolors

Member
This makes me sad because the game tried to do something new... and things like this scare off future attempts to try new things...

The game had some fantastic ideas. But where did it fail? Content? Execution?
Terrible connection issues are the death of multiplayer games
 
Yeah I run into a lot of the same people when I play. It does not bother me but the community has definitely become pretty small.

I know they have content planned for the rest of the year so even if nothing comes after that I won't really mind. I'll be playing it for a long time to come because it's such a unique game. I'll probably be there until the game gets shut down.
 

OVDRobo

Member
Unfortunate given the interesting concept but issues with networking, micro-transactions and just the fact that the game is tough to be competent at without moderate amounts of time investment all went against it.
 

killroy87

Member
That doesn't make it 'better'.

It puts it in context though. For Honor just "feels" like a console game. I can't imagine anyone is surprised it doesn't have a dedicated PC community.

I'm sure PS4 is doing much better, but some level of audience tapering off is expected.
 

Thraktor

Member
Not a big enough sample size?

Consoles doing better?

I still haven't even tried the game.

The game uses uPlay, which means that anyone who bought it on any other PC marketplace won't show up on these statistics. Even people who bought it on Steam might not, I'm pretty sure once you've bought it on Steam you can bypass the Steam app altogether and just launch it through uPlay (which is likely the quicker way to get into the game).
 

kuYuri

Member
I still wonder how many people exclusively have it on Uplay. The article didn't cover that, did it?

Also, comparing beta numbers to launch numbers is flawed. One is free, the other typically requires an investment of money.

That's crazy. I really wish they didn't kill the sp part of the game. Pretty much killed my interest in the game.

The SP is still in the game.
 

Ashtar

Member
Is their going to be an article next month with the same headline about ghost recon next month?

I have to say though as a publisher going for a games as service model huge launches with massive drop offs doesn't inspire confidence
 
For shame. Interesting concept, but my internet (and location) is not ready for this kind of game yet.

Great game with frequent balance updates but the servers/netcode are still largely garbage so I'm not surprised.

Steam though? Is it even on steam? Thought it was uplay exclusive on PC.

I don't think there's uplay exclusive games on PC, especially for the new ones.
 

pizzacat

Banned
It puts it in context though. For Honor just "feels" like a console game. I can't imagine anyone is surprised it doesn't have a dedicated PC community.

I'm sure PS4 is doing much better, but some level of audience tapering off is expected.
Why would a pseudo fighting game (as told by the people who play it) be definitive in a place where it's not at 60fps?
 

Patryn

Member
They're calling The Division one of 2016's biggest bombs?

Just because a game loses its players does not make it a bomb. The Division sold fucktons.
 

zeorhymer

Member
I honestly didn't know about the game until launch. When I digged deeper into it, I wasn't too interested in it. If there's going to be a major focus on multiplayer, they better back it up from the get go to keep retention rate high.
 

Anung

Un Rama
I want to love this and I put in a few hours every other day but it's issues are just too bullshit to ignore. They need to sort it out or I'll move on.
 
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