The Division is having a bad time. Ubisoft Massive had a big launch, and a clean launch, earning plaudits from fans and critics alike. But things have taken a bit of a turn since then — the game’s first major update brought with it new gear, a new endgame activity, and a raft of bugs and exploits that have rendered the game frustrating, unbalanced, and sometimes just broken. Ubisoft is working hard to regain players’ trust, but it’s a tall order, and these early months are crucial for getting people addicted to any sort of MMO experience. I checked the game’s presence on Steamcharts.com (a bot that pulls concurrent user data from Valve) to see a little bit of just how bad the bleed has been, and it’s not pretty. For the biggest difference possible, we see that the game had 113,877 peak concurrent players on launch day, as compared to 11,186 yesterday. That’s a steep drop of 89.58%.
It’s not a perfect analog for total playerbase decline. This is primarily a console game, and this chart doesn’t take into account Xbox One and PS4 players, not to mention anyone signing in directly through uPlay on PC. Theoretically the Steam decline could still approximate those other platforms, but it’s also highly likely that we’ve seen a more rapid decline on PC than on other platforms due to the prevalence of cheating. That’s a whole different problem, of course, but one that likely skews this number up from what we’ve seen with the rest of the playerbase.
Still — 90%. We always expect to see a decline in concurrent users since the moment after launch, but The Division has continued more or less unabated since then. A good reference point could be 54,455 on April 12 — all the players that logged on to check out that big Incursion update. That’s still nearly an 80% decline since then. Console playerbases are likely not quite as dire, but it would need to be a massive difference for this not to be a major problem across platforms.
Update 1.2 is coming. Plenty of people signed in on April 12, after all, and I imagine there’s still enough people with a vested interest in The Division that some solid new content, some better systems, and no new bugs could start to resuscitate this game. We all remember Diablo 3, after all, which has slowly morphed into an entirely different game over the course of several years, saving its playerbase in the process. It’s a long road at this point, however. A long road.
It’s not a perfect analog for total playerbase decline. This is primarily a console game, and this chart doesn’t take into account Xbox One and PS4 players, not to mention anyone signing in directly through uPlay on PC. Theoretically the Steam decline could still approximate those other platforms, but it’s also highly likely that we’ve seen a more rapid decline on PC than on other platforms due to the prevalence of cheating. That’s a whole different problem, of course, but one that likely skews this number up from what we’ve seen with the rest of the playerbase.
Still — 90%. We always expect to see a decline in concurrent users since the moment after launch, but The Division has continued more or less unabated since then. A good reference point could be 54,455 on April 12 — all the players that logged on to check out that big Incursion update. That’s still nearly an 80% decline since then. Console playerbases are likely not quite as dire, but it would need to be a massive difference for this not to be a major problem across platforms.
Update 1.2 is coming. Plenty of people signed in on April 12, after all, and I imagine there’s still enough people with a vested interest in The Division that some solid new content, some better systems, and no new bugs could start to resuscitate this game. We all remember Diablo 3, after all, which has slowly morphed into an entirely different game over the course of several years, saving its playerbase in the process. It’s a long road at this point, however. A long road.
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