Analysts officially reveal that the Steam player numbers for Activision and Infinity Ward's Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare are lower than Ubisoft's Rainbow Six Siege.

Despite being touted as one of the most highly anticipated games of the year, it was recently reported that the first week sales figures for Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare were down by 48.4% in the UK when compared to the launch of 2015's Black Ops 3. Now, it seems as if the most recent entry in the long-running first-person shooter franchise has had its popularity dip more than expected on Steam, as the platform's player numbers for the game are currently lower than Ubisoft's Rainbow Six Siege.

As shown by the Steam Store stats, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare's peak simultaneous players so far today on the PC gaming service has maxed out at 11,000, leaving the title trailing behind Rainbow Six Siege and the bank-heist shooter Payday 2Rainbow Six Siege currently topped out at 12,000 peak concurrent players today, while there have been 15,500 fans playing Payday 2 at its peak today.

According to the data-intelligence site known as Githyp (and seen in the outlet's graph below), over the launch weekend for Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, the game's player base has dropped 76 percent when compared to that of Black Ops 3 when it released. As a matter of fact, the latest shooter from Activision and Infinity Ward only was able to generate a peak player count of 15,280 people on Steam through Sunday, whereas its precursor in Black Ops 3 garnered upwards of 60,000 simultaneous players during the same weekend in 2015.

Of course, some might argue that most fans purchased the Legacy or Digital Deluxe Editions of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare solely to play Modern Warfare Remastered, which could be affecting the player count of the former title. However, even if that were the case, it only accounts for another 4,546 players to the community of folks playing Infinite Warfare.

Not only has Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare's Steam player number registered as surprisingly low so close to its launch, but also the franchise's livestream viewer counts have gone down, including the PC version of the game as well as its PlayStation 4 and Xbox One iterations. As Githyp explains, "Viewer counts have also been half of what they were last year with Infinite Warfare peaking at 101,000 viewers on Twitch. Black Ops 3 peaked at 190,000 viewers on Twitch which made it No. 1 for 2 days in 2015."

Taking all of this into consideration, it seems quite possible that interest in the Call of Duty franchise is dwindling, or at the very least, fans of the series weren't keen on taking on yet another futuristic-styled shooter from Activision. Perhaps Call of Duty can pull out of its PC player slump by going back to World War II with its next installment, or maybe Infinite Warfare's user base will grow on the platform when it begins putting out DLC.

Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is available now for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

Source: Githyp, Steam Store (via VentureBeat)