The Division can likely be considered one of Ubisoft’s biggest success in 2016. However, leading up to its’s success has been a fairly rocky road. Even from the get go the launch date for The Division was pushed back multiple times but once it finally launched it quickly became one of the biggest hits on the market. Unfortunately for Ubisoft, however, players started to drop out sooner than the developers had expected. Players started leaving once the novelty of it being the ‘newest game’ wore off. Unfortunately, the game was not preforming at the level of excellence needed to maintain player numbers, and that’s never good.

Some players left the game earlier than what we thought, then we had to make that tough call – do we keep providing them with extra content or do we stop everything for a while, settle down, fix everything and then once the game is where it should be, then we start providing more content.

Fortunately, Ubisoft has an amazing public relations team and amazing developers. Ubisoft has built a reputation of listening to their fan base and doing everything they can to make the gaming experience as high quality as possible. The developer decided that moving forward with The Division the best course of action would be to slow things down for a minute and really focus on improving the game. The have listened to their fans, found the problems, and fixed them, and now due to their efforts they have seen the number of active players rise back to levels virtually on par with the numbers at the time of launch.

And this is what we did, the community was super happy about it, even though they were disappointed at first that we were to push back the next DLC releases. We had a dedicated task force come over to Massive, and then we had the Public Test Server where people could play [patches] before release and [give feedback], making sure it was responding to community needs.

Since the release of patch 1.4, we went back to the daily active users we had at launch, because people were so impressed. People realized we meant what we said.

Ubisoft really managed to take a seriously declining situation and turn it completely around. They even say that the community was getting pretty upset but now not only are their active player numbers rising, since that latest patches, but players are returning with a more positive outlook. The numbers are up, and the fans are happy. Well done Ubisoft! Stay tuned to DFTG for all your gaming news and if you’re a fan of The Division, check out the 1.4 patch details here!