For Honor released on Valentine's Day to positive reviews and tens of thousands of viewers on Twitch. While it was a promising start for the Ubisoft title, it's now clear that For Honor's playerbase has dwindled since launch with the game's numbers on Steam dropping by more than 50 percent.

Githyp notes that For Honor was in Steam's top 10 most played games on launch day with more than 46,000 players but the number of active users dropped to 21,000 just one week later. Since then, the game has brought in between 15,000 and 21,000 active players per day on the platform.

To be fair, Steam is not the only way to play For Honor as the game is also available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Uplay, Ubisoft's PC client. But Steam is certainly a large enough sample size that some assumptions can be made about how the game is performing on these other platforms.

The downward trend is similar to what happened to another Ubisoft game, The Division when it released last year. That game lost more than 80 percent of its player base on PC within a couple of months of launch, although Ubisoft has taken steps over the last few months to win back some of those early adopters.

As happens to just about all online games these days, it's true that PC users encountered some server problems and bugs shortly after For Honor's launch but there are likely some additional factors responsible for driving players away from the game. For Honor's main focus is on PvP and in that area it has proven to be a complex title with a very deep combat system. It's possible some players may have lost interest if they went in expecting a button mashing experience only to be turned off by the much more nuanced gameplay.

It's also worth noting that two potential Game of the Year candidates in Horizon: Zero Dawn and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild recently hit stores, just a couple of weeks after For Honor's release date. There are likely some For Honor players who quickly decided to move on to the next big thing. The question is whether any of those players will give Ubisoft's title another chance after the Horizon and Zelda hype dies down. It's true that For Honor does have some DLC on the way that might help, but right now, it's looking like it's going to be an uphill climb for the Ubisoft title to get its playerbase numbers moving in the right direction again.

For Honor is out now on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

Source: Githyp