Interest in The Division 2 is Down Significantly with Viewer Counts for the Beta Much Lower than the First Game on Twitch

Whenever a highly anticipated new triple-A game debuts, whether as a beta or an official launch, it usually jumps up to the #1 position on Twitch with hundreds of thousands of viewers watching the most popular streamers go hands-on with real gameplay.

That hasn’t been the case with Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, which had its first beta start yesterday and only managed to peak with an underwhelming 105k concurrent viewers on Twitch.

While six figure viewer counts aren’t bad at all, when comparing The Division 2’s numbers to other recent hit multiplayer games, it becomes apparent that interest in Ubisoft’s sequel has dropped off significantly among streamers and the gaming community.

Earlier this week, the free-to-play battle royale from the creators of Titanfall, Apex Legends, debuted with a peak of 486k viewers on Twitch. Last week, Ubisoft’s other upcoming shooter-looter competition (also from EA), Anthem, had its beta peak at 324k viewers.

Two months ago, the pirate MMO, Atlas, debuted with a peak of 318k viewers. And at the end of last year, the beta for Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 peaked with 508k viewers; indicating a huge comeback for Activision’s struggling series that was once the king of shooters.

Like Ubisoft’s Starlink: Battle for Atlas and Watch Dogs 2 — the former which completely flopped while the latter peaked at a shockingly low 60k viewers on Twitch and 18k players on Steam — The Division 2’s official launch is looking like yet another underperforming sequel from Ubisoft when stacked up against the competition.

And things only get worse considering that the viewer counts for The Division 2 are already down 30% compared to the first game’s 149k viewers three years ago on Twitch.

Although many have claimed over the years that viewer counts aren’t a good indicator for sales, after years of tracking viewer and player counts on GitHyp, we’re seeing that simply isn’t true.

Most recently, low viewer counts on Twitch indicated poor sales and problems for both Battlefield V and Fallout 76 way before Bethesda, EA, or the media officially reported on both failing to meet expectations.

But unlike Battlefield and Fallout, both of which hurt the reputations of once-beloved franchises, The Division‘s name already comes with the stigma of the first game — which explains the current lack of hype for the sequel and gamers lowering their expectations this time.

For those unaware of the franchise’s troubled history: After failing to deliver upon most of the promises of Watch Dogs, Ubisoft doubled down on misleading gamers and followed up with The Division‘s now-infamous fake E3 2013 “gameplay” reveal.

The result? As we were first to report back in 2015, The Division became Ubisoft’s best-selling game ever, then had a massive 93% decline in its player base only three short months after launching as players realized they didn’t get what they had hoped for and ran out of things to do in the game.

More recently, Ubisoft upset gamers again by making the controversial announcement that The Division 2 would be skipping Steam and launching exclusively on Uplay and the Epic Games Store.

With Steam being the biggest market for PC gaming, cutting out one of the primary sources for sales is yet another poor decision by the publisher that can be attributed to killing the game’s hype; but then again, it might actually be a good move now considering Uplay and Epic’s Store will hide the official player counts from the public, which based on early viewer counts, will likely be lower than most are expecting.