Games That Lost Almost All Of Their Playerbase Within Months.

Given the hit-driven nature of the video game industry, releasing an online game has always been considered a risky business endeavor. These are games that had a chance, but lost their audience due to technical problems, lack of innovative content, and overall poor planning on the part of their studios.

Realm Royale attracted a following among Twitch streamers shortly after its release, which encouraged many gamers to give it a try. Unfortunately, few of them stuck around for long. After peaking at an average of 105,167 concurrent players in June 2018, less than 5,000 people were playing the game two months later.

That amounts to a 95% decline. What went wrong? Primarily, the market was already flooded with battle royale games trying to capitalize on the popularity of Fortnite, and Realm Royale didn't do enough differently to stand out from the crowd. On top of that, early reports of the game crashing did little to help it establish a loyal following.

The good news is that the game uses AI characters to fill empty player spots, so you'll never have to wait to find people to play with. The downside is that you could be competing against 99 incompetent bots. "It's not even challenging anymore. It's like shooting fish in a barrel." Tom Clancy's The Division made over $330 million in just five days, making it Ubisoft's most successful launch yet.

Peaking at more than 2.1 million players in a single day, the population plummeted to about 143,000 daily players three months later, a 93% decline. By that time, there were more people playing Rainbow Six: Siege, Ubisoft's previous release. While The Division was praised by critics for its presentation, those who played it encountered game-breaking bugs and problems with matchmaking.

Post-apocalyptic Manhattan was stunning to look at, but the open world felt strangely barren. The gameplay lacked the complexity and variety that fans of RPG shooters have come to expect. The online elements were actually the most enjoyable aspect of The Division, but they just didn't always work.

The PC community quickly devolved into lawlessness as cheating and hacking became rampant. Things got so bad that even more DLC couldn't bring lapsed players back. Ubisoft was on a losing streak when For Honor came out in 2017, just one year after The Division collapsed.

But For Honor realized all of Ubisoft's worst fears: the game lost 95% of its players on Steam within three months, beating The Division's previous abysmal decline. As the beta version of For Honor gained attention on Twitch, gamers were intrigued by the visually stunning melee combat.

Those who actually got to play the game, however, were disappointed, and they were vocal about their displeasure. The game had such a bad reputation before its official release that there were fewer players at launch than there were in beta. Despite initially successful sales numbers and numerous critical accolades, For Honor peaked at just 45,000 concurrent players in its first week on Steam while the beta version had 71,000 at its peak.

Deterred by technical hiccups, the majority of players had given up within weeks of the official release. Despite being a departure for developer BioWare, Anthem was one of the company's most successful launches. The excitement was short lived, though, as critics and players lamented the game's lack of depth and polish.

Players complained that the game felt incomplete. While the game wasn't unplayable, it didn't do enough to differentiate itself from all of the other loot shooters. Anthem quickly dropped off of the top 50 games chart on Xbox One. The week Anthem fell off the charts, Battlefield 1 sat at the number 50 spot, which was averaging 2,500 to 7,500 concurrent players on Xbox One.

That means Anthem had fewer than 2,500 players. To further put this into perspective, it performed worse than Fallout 76, which — we probably don't have to remind you — was universally hated by critics. "That's an all-time low! Ew… Yuck!" Given the popularity of high-fantasy MMORPGs in the mid-2000s, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes should have been a success, especially since it had the backing of Sony and the EverQuest team.

Unfortunately, the game was rushed and released six months earlier than expected, which turned out to be a poor decision. To make matters worse, it came out the same week as World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, which eclipsed any hype surrounding Vanguard.

While the WoW expansion pack sold millions of copies in one day, Vanguard sold 200,000 copies in its first month with only 90,000 subscribers sticking around to play. Developer Brad McQuaid told IGN: " … the vast majority of people who played it early on left by the time their characters hit level two or three." That's at least partly thanks to frame rate and latency issues, which made the game literally unplayable, causing most players to give up before they really got started.

Sony kept the game on life support until it officially pulled the plug on July 31, 2014. In April 2019, Apex Legends reportedly brought in $24 million, which is a lot of money — but it's a far cry from the $92 million the game brought in just two months earlier, when the playerbase for the new battle royale game reportedly surged to 50 million players.

These days, that's supposedly closer to 8-to-10 million. Most games lose players after launch, but that kind of drop-off had to disappoint Respawn, the game's developer. By the time the first battle pass came out, the majority of initial players had moved on.

That said, Apex Legends was critically acclaimed for introducing new elements to the battle royale genre. There's still time for Respawn to turn things around, but the company needs to start releasing more content to keep players engaged, improve the quality of loot crates, and lower the outrageous cost of cosmetic DLC.

"I've got a bad feeling about this…" EA DICE's take on Star Wars: Battlefront came out at the perfect time. The first Star Wars film in a decade was right around the corner, so fans were ready for another trip through a galaxy far, far away. Unlike The Force Awakens, the game was given a lukewarm reception.

Behind the stellar graphics and sound design, there was very little, well… game. By simplifying the gameplay to make it more accessible to casual players, EA alienated the hardcore fans of the original. No campaign mode, very little single player content, and restrictive multiplayer options didn't give the 12 million players who bought the game reason to keep playing.

A month after launch, the average number of players on PC dipped to 33,000.
Battlefield 4, which came out two years prior, had more players than that at the same time. Apparently, the developers learned nothing, because the 2017 sequel fared no better.