For Honor Player and Viewer Count Launch Numbers

After the rise and fall of some of Ubisoft’s biggest games last year, we’ve been keeping an eye on For Honor over the past two months leading up to the game’s launch. Although the melee combat game’s closed beta on Uplay prevented us from tracking the initial player counts, its exclusiveness sparked enough interest among gamers and viewers to capture the #1 spot on Twitch back in January.

Two weeks later, For Honor’s open beta unlocked on Steam where it pulled in an impressive 71,748 players at its peak. The beta cracking the top 3 most played games on Steam was a clear indication that the multiplayer brawler was set for a big launch, and while For Honor did in fact have a strong launch with a peak of 45,836 players on its first day, that number was down 36% from the open beta.

For Honor’s first weekend on Steam was able to match Tuesday’s launch with a peak of 45,944 players on Saturday. Although not as drastic as the beta’s drop-off, after its first seven days on Steam, For Honor’s player counts dropped another 33% down to a peak of 30,747 players yesterday.

For Honor’s Peak Player Counts on Steam via GitHyp

With all the controversy surrounding Ubisoft recently, it’s good to see that they’ve stuck to their original decision of including real-time player counts tucked away in For Honor’s in-game social menu. We’ve seen some make arguments that Steam’s numbers aren’t a large enough sample size to use when analyzing games, but now we have proof of Steam’s importance with the platform accounting for over half of all PC players.

On Saturday when the player counts were at a peak of 45k on Steam, For Honor’s in-game counts (which factor in all PC players) were reporting 83k total players. Considering that most top digital download sites usually sell the Uplay versions cheaper than Steam (or don’t sell the Steam versions at all) and that hardware-related free code promotion bundles all focus on Uplay, it’s always been assumed that Uplay was the primary platform for Ubisoft games on PC. That no longer seems to be the case when looking at the player counts where Steam makes up for 54% of For Honor‘s PC players.

Meanwhile on Twitch, For Honor’s official launch came just short of its 146k closed beta debut with a peak of 123,761 viewers. As expected, that number has declined drastically over the past week down to a peak of only 54k viewers yesterday. But even with only 37% of its initial viewers left, For Honor still remains in Twitch’s top 10 most watched games after its first week.