Report: Ubisoft Wants Steam to Remove Concurrent Player Counts

Update From the Editor: It seems that upon further investigation, this “source” is unreliable, and has been known to cause controversy when there is none. While we are leaving the article up as a reference point, we would take anything said by the original source with a huge truckload of salt.

There’s no surprise that Ubisoft is struggling right now. Their stock price is down, and recent games haven’t gained much attention. Investors are getting worried, with some even suggesting Ubisoft should go private to take control of its future.

According to Fandom Pulse (paywalled), a Ubisoft insider has revealed that the company has asked Valve to remove or hide the concurrent player count data for its games on Steam. Ubisoft is reportedly unhappy that gamers, the press, and investors can easily see how poorly their games are performing, especially with tracking tools like SteamDB that show the number of simultaneous players.

The company allegedly wants Steam to stop showing this data in order to better manage the perception of their titles. As the Ubisoft insider told Fandom Pulse, “Ubisoft and other companies want to pressure Steam to stop Stream tracker from giving out info they want to keep to themselves.” The goal seems to be to present a more favorable picture to investors, who could be discouraged by the reality of their games’ lackluster performance.

A prime example is Star Wars: Outlaws, which was expected to perform well given its massive marketing budget. However, despite being released nearly three months ago, the game hasn’t even sold two million units yet. Reports from September showed it had only sold around 1 million copies in its first month.

Investors had initially hoped the game would sell at least five million units in its first month, as noted in an analyst call with Barclays’ Nick Dempsey, where he questioned whether Ubisoft was being overly conservative in their projections. Unfortunately, those expectations have not been met.

The situation worsened when Star Wars: Outlaws launched on Steam. The game had a disappointing debut with just 834 peak concurrent players, and while that number grew to 2,492 over the weekend, it still remains extremely low for a AAA title. This follows the release of a 25% discount and the launch of the game’s first story pack, both attempts to boost player engagement.

Given all this, it’s not surprising that Ubisoft would want to remove access to this data. As with other major media companies, Ubisoft seems to be following a trend of trying to obfuscate their performance metrics. Disney, Netflix, and even comic book publishers have all been criticized for hiding or manipulating data to avoid public embarrassment.

However, it remains to be seen whether Ubisoft can turn things around, but one thing is clear: hiding player counts or sales data won’t fix the bigger problem that Star Wars: Outlaws—and Ubisoft’s recent games in general—are struggling to engage players.

More MP1st Reading:

• Ubisoft Faces Class Action Lawsuit Over The Crew Shutdown
• Ubisoft Largely Confirms Rumors of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown Team’s Disbandment
• Ubisoft Monetization Director “Ashamed” and “Sad” at Gamers and Devs Wishing Company to Fail

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