For Honor

We clashed into For Honor in February 2017 during Ubisoft's medieval fighter launch, and it was chaos in the best possible way. We spent 139 hours exploring For Honor's premise: four-player teams, medieval and fantasy heroes, one-on-one duels where positioning and prediction mattered more than twitch reflexes. This was Ubisoft trying to do something different in the competitive space, and the launch was rough. Server issues plagued early matches—matchmaking took forever, disconnects were common, balance was all over the place. But the core combat was genuinely interesting: watching players learn spacing, learn parry timing, learn how different characters countered each other. We averaged 657 viewers during that 2017 window, which is solid for a middling multiplayer launch. The 1,352 peak came during launch week when the house was gathered to watch Ubisoft's ambitious failure unfold in real time.

For Honor's 139 hours generated 95,679 hours watched with a 657 average—above our baseline by a significant margin. The 1,352 peak is substantial. What explains this engagement? Launch window chaos and morbid fascination, mostly. For Honor was Ubisoft's big swing for February 2017—high-budget, high-expectation. When it launched broken, people showed up to watch it burn. The 657 average reflects a game that had a core audience of strategic thinkers despite all the problems. We lost 314 followers across our coverage, which suggests people came for the chaos and didn't convert to regular viewers. The game wasn't broken enough to be amusing or good enough to hold interest long-term.

For Honor was our way of documenting the middle ground of gaming: too expensive and ambitious to ignore completely, too broken to be genuinely good. The people watching were split between fans of the concept hoping Ubisoft would fix it and skeptics waiting for it to fail. We provided the venue for both groups to coexist. Chat debated whether the game had potential or if Ubisoft was fundamentally misunderstanding what players wanted. That conversation was valuable even though we lost followers overall. For Honor taught our community something: you don't need to be rooting for a game to find value in documenting its trajectory. Sometimes the story of a failed promise is more interesting than the story of success.