In the video game industry, there's always something else for gamers to play, and new
games risk losing their player-bases almost as soon as they get them—a fact these games
found out the hard way.
Here are the hotly anticipated games that lost most of their playerbase in just a few
short months.
Tom Clancy's The Division
Ubisoft's much anticipated third-person shooter The Division launched to critical acclaim
in March 2016.
By June—only three months later—the game had lost 93 percent of its player-base, falling
from 2.1 million players per day to a mere 143,000.
While the online shooter was by no means a bad game, The Division had its fair share
of problems.
Matchmaking issues and stat bugs stunted gameplay, with cheating and hacking plaguing the Dark
Zone.
These days, The Division is all but dead, with less than three percent of the game's
launch-window peak still playing.
It's tough to imagine Ubisoft feeling too bad about the drop-off in players, however—seeing
as they raked in $330 million in five days.
"Now to sleep the sleep of the just."
For Honor
Hitting shelves in February 2017, Ubisoft's For Honor promised explosive player-versus-player
combat, with gamers able to fight as either knights, samurai, or vikings in a medieval
setting.
Sounds incredible, right?
Like many games from the top-tier French developer, For Honor looked—and in many ways, was—awesome.
Unfortunately, severe technical issues rewarded Ubisoft with a 95 percent reduction in the
game's player-base in only three months.
In a game that's all about thinking ahead and executing quick reactions, Ubisoft's decision
to run For Honor over a peer-to-peer connection completely ruined the experience.
Players who bought For Honor at launch were seriously disappointed, and even organized
a boycott of the game.
Nobody wants to see a game fail, but—unfortunately—For Honor just couldn't keep players interested.
No Man's Sky
This game promised it all—some 18 quintillion planets, nearly unlimited exploration, epic
battles, and space dinosaurs.
So what went wrong?
Well, it turns out that the infinite reaches of space can be kind of...boring.
No Man's Sky peaked on launch day, grabbing upwards of 212,000 concurrent players on Steam.
Less than a week later, 78 percent of those who gave Hello Games' space exploration title
a shot simply gave up.
Not even two full months later, No Man's Sky was seeing less than 1,000 players per hour—resulting
in a 94 percent drop in only 42 days.
Street Fighter V
Launched in February 2016, Street Fighter V was supposed to be a major console exclusive
for PlayStation 4.
Sadly, the vast majority of players who picked up the famous fighting game tapped out—and
tapped out quickly.
Plaguing the launch of Capcom's title was the stark lack of content and no Arcade Mode—the
bread and butter of the Street Fighter franchise.
Even worse, rampant rage-quitting soured gamers' experience in multiplayer matches.
Quitters ultimately got what was coming to them, but the early damage was done.
The poor experience was enough to put over 75 percent of players off the game, and most
people who left Street Fighter V never returned.
"Game over!"
Resident Evil 7: Biohazard
Admittedly, most people put down single-player-only games after they've beaten the main story.
Nevertheless, Resident Evil 7 saw 90 percent of its playerbase disappear after only one
month on the market.
At the game's peak, it averaged roughly 15,000 players per hour on Steam.
One month later, that number had dwindled to 1,500 per hour.
Rapidly declining player-base aside, Resident Evil 7 was a pretty big success for the franchise,
with launch numbers doubling that of Resident Evil 6, and with the game being received well
by both critics and fans alike.
Still, at its best, Resident Evil 7 topped out at #19 on Steam's charts, and shareholders
apparently weren't impressed.
Fortunately, none of that looks like it's putting a damper on Resident Evil 8.
Evolve
It only took one month for 2K Games' multiplayer-centric Evolve to feel the pressure of a rapidly-declining
player-base.
Not only did the game receive mixed reviews, but its expensive DLC package certainly didn't
leave a good taste in any gamers' mouths.
The game saw its player-base dwindle on almost a daily basis, steadily decreasing until Turtle
Rock Studios had no choice but to swallow their pride and make the game free-to-play—a
last resort for a game that released at full-retail.
Making the game cost nothing effectively injected some life into the title, but the boost didn't
last long, and you'll find yourself sitting in a matchmaking lobby for a long time these
days.
Battleborn
Gearbox Software, the studio behind the popular Borderlands series, poured more than two years
worth of resources into the creation of Battleborn, only to have their first-person game completely
overshadowed by Blizzard's outstanding Overwatch.
Battleborn had such a rough launch, in fact, that the game only saw an abysmal 12,101 concurrent
players on release day, and absolutely plummeted in the days and weeks that followed.
In a desperate attempt to keep the game alive, the developers have made the game essentially
free-to-play.
Sometimes, the stars just don't align.
Pokémon GO
Niantic's mobile app Pokémon GO took the world by storm when it launched in July 2016.
By September, however, the game was all but abandoned.
According to reports, Pokémon GO peaked on July 13th, 2016, with 28.5 million users in
the United States alone.
Nearly nine million of those users quit playing by the end of the first month.
By the following month, almost two-thirds of the app's peak users decided they'd had
enough of the craze.
Nevertheless, Niantic had a major hit on their hands, proving that the Pokémon brand is
as viable as ever.
Titanfall
Released just a few months after the Xbox One, Respawn's first iteration in the Titanfall
series was slated to be the first true "next-gen" title.
Sadly, the game was hamstrung by content, and saw its player-base dropped off quickly.
The biggest problem was that Titanfall wasn't just "an online shooter."
It was, for all intents and purposes, an online-only first-person shooter—lacking a single-player
campaign, or any content for users not looking to play the same multiplayer matches day in
and day out.
Plus, being an Xbox One exclusive severely limited the player base to begin with, and
many of the console's gamers moved on quickly to other titles.
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