It's No Secret Why The Division's Playerbase Plummeted After Three Months
Sales numbers don't always tell the full story of if a game is good or bad. Sometimes, what's more important is retention. In other words, how many people are still playing that game six months later? 2016's "The Division" was one of many games that failed to keep players interested. At the time of the game's launch, 2.1 million players were logging on daily on Steam alone (per GitHyp). Only three months later, that number dropped to a comparatively measly 143,000, a drop off of 93 percent.
In terms of concurrent players — meaning those playing the game at the exact same time — the drop-off is similarly staggering. At launch, Steam Charts shows as many as 65,000 people were logged on at the same time on Steam, with an all-time peak of 113,877 players. Over the last 30 days, however, the average number of concurrent players has been 674.
It's not too difficult to figure out what exactly went wrong. Numerous former players of the game have since taken to social media to air out their grievances — and these players made it quite clear why exactly "The Division" failed.
Why players abandoned The Division
Players credit a lack of in-game content as the reason they quit playing "The Division." In one Reddit thread, a player argued there was "absolutely nothing to do" in "The Division" besides demolishing generic enemies. In the same thread, another player claimed that, as soon as you hit the end-game, the in-game content became scarce and stale. Another user, bubuopapa, seemed to summarize the problems best.
"[T]his game failed because it had very little playable content, most of the action is happening in game development, [sic] the game itself is super boring," the user wrote. "Having 'super humans' as enemies that take hundreds of bullets to kill is not fun and [is] boring, [sic] all these weapons and customizations are huge bs also, because in game you can't really see them, compared to huge weapons in some fantasy games."
So not only is gameplay repetitive and enemies a trial to beat, they don't even drop good loot to upgrade a player's gear when they're beaten. This can make the game feel tedious at best.
With games like "The Division" that promise to be open-world MMOs, a detailed world with an abundance of side-mission content is everything. Apparently, this game failed to meet its promises when it came to the quality and quantity of that content, at least in the eyes of many of its players. Hopefully, the upcoming latest installment to the series — "The Division: Heartland" — avoids making similar mistakes.