For Honor Playerbase Down By 95% on Steam Since Launch

Ubisoft’s multiplayer hack-and-slash For Honor isn’t doing too well. It’s bleeding players profusely, with the playerbase going down by 95% barely four months since launch. The release of Season 2 with new maps and heroes did nothing to improve the number. The figure is only for Steam, not Uplay, but it still doesn’t bode well.

For Honor launched on February 14th 2017 and it had a fairly rocky start. To being with, it had 36% less players at launch than during the Beta stage. Connection issues were rampant, leading to approximately half of the players from all platforms abandoning the game in the first two weeks, according to Githyp.

The situation only got worse over time. Enduring issues, coupled with rampant microtransactions and lack of support from Ubisoft led to players planning a boycott on April 3rd. Ubisoft intervened and stopped the impending disaster, but the damage to consumer trust had already been done.

Now, For Honor is doing worse than ever before, if Steamspy statistics are anything to go by. At launch, the game peaked at 45.000 players. Less than a month ago, on May 16th, it had a little over 7.500. On June 6th, the number of concurrent players went down to a pitiful 2.862. The game is seriously hurting, and Ubisoft really has nobody to blame but themselves.

The launch of For Honor Season 2, with two new heroes and maps, did absolutely nothing to stop the downward spiral. It launched on May 16th, and, as we’ve said, only about 7.500 Steam players were around to witness it. Ubisoft’s horrible PR and downright insulting micortransactions killed the game off, and there’s no helping it. What else can you expect, if you brazenly tell players that the reason for in-game currency unlocking at such a snail’s pace is that you never intended them to own everything anyway?

What’s really sad is that the concept (and, to an extent, the execution) behind For Honor is really cool. It could’ve been a great game. Perhaps the game’s nosedive will be a lesson for triple-A publishers. While we’re on a wishful thinking roll, perhaps the new Assassin’s Creed won’t have Ubisoft towers.