For Honor has made its fair share of news in regards to its player count on Steam, and little if any of it has been good. That changed this week where its average hourly player count on Steam has tripled from where it was last week.
According to numbers on GitHyp, For Honor averaged about 1,300 hourly players on Steam around this time last week and earlier. In the past few days, that number has been up to more than 4,000 at times. While not groundbreaking, these numbers are enough to crack Steam’s Top 100 in terms of peak and current player count numbers.
Of course, last weekend starting with Thursday, August 10th, For Honor did have a free weekend, which pushed its hourly player count to a peak of more than 8,000, but Ubisoft’s unique fighter/hack-and-slash has seen sustained increases in the days after the free weekend completed. This is likely aided by the start of For Honor Season 3. Like any popular multiplayer game, these events will often bring with them a surge in players, as we see with games such as Overwatch, where seasonal events bring idle players back in droves.
Ubisoft has gone on record lamenting the reports of low player count, with one rep even calling such reports “fake news,” and there is some validity to that argument. Player count numbers on GitHyp are only for Steam, and For Honor players can access the game through Uplay, PS4 and Xbox One, where there is no means of tracking those player count numbers. That said, it does seem a little cavalier to discount the loss of tens of thousands of players, even if it was only on one platform.
It also remains to be seen how long these new players will stick around. That said, I’d wager that player count will see a huge surge once For Honor makes its announced switch to dedicated servers, as opposed to peer-to-peer, which was one of the key points of criticism among reviewers and players alike.
