Nearly two weeks since the new Avatar movie, more and more players have been checking out the 2023 video game from Ubisoft.
While it’s very much a Far Cry clone but with big blue aliens, Ubisoft’s Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora is still a solid Far Cry clone and certainly the best video game tie-in to come out of James Cameron’s Avatar franchise.
The lack of official sales numbers, though, suggests it wasn’t the hit Ubisoft wanted it to be and it didn’t help that the game launched a whole year after Avatar: The Way Of Water, missing the chance to ride the hype of the movie’s popularity.
Ubisoft must have learned from that as it made a point to have a new DLC expansion, From The Ashes, prepared to coincide with this year’s Avatar: Fire And Ash. And not only is said DLC very good, but it also seems to have greatly reinvigorated interest in Frontiers Of Pandora, especially on PC.
According to SteamDB, Frontiers Of Pandora’s player count has bounced up and down from as high as 2,614 to as low as 409 since its launch. On Friday, December 19, which saw the launch of both the DLC and the new movie, the player count then leapt to over 3,000.
This wasn’t just a flash in the pan that only persisted through the following weekend, though. Nearly two weeks later and the number has only kept rising. This past weekend, the game’s concurrent player count reached a new all-time peak of 12,496.
For the record, Frontiers Of Pandora didn’t come to Steam until June 2024 and it only garnered 1,117 players at the time, meaning the player count is more than ten times higher than when it launched.
It’s not just a case of old players returning for the DLC either. There’s been a boon of newcomers too since Frontiers Of Pandora has also climbed Steam’s sales charts.
Last week, the game wasn’t even in the top 30, but now it’s sat at number 12, right behind Battlefield 6 and Baldur’s Gate 3. It does help, though, that Frontiers Of Pandora is enjoying a discount at the moment, with it priced at £16.74 instead of the usual £24.99.
Ironically, the bump in players could also be due to dissatisfaction with the latest movie. Fire And Ash has by no means been a flop, but its box office opening has been significantly smaller than The Way Of Water’s and even critical reviews are more mixed compared to the first two movies.
Whatever the case, this is a perfect example of how effective cross-promotion can be for video games, particularly if publishers have something new to sell, even if it is DLC for a two-year-old game.
That said, this uptick in players doesn’t mean Ubisoft will feel incentivised to greenlight a sequel any time soon. Aside from the fact developer Massive Entertainment is busy with The Division 3, Ubisoft seems convinced that traditional ‘full’ games are on their way out, implying an increased focus on free-to-play games and live service games.
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Plus, with last year’s Star Wars Outlaws not being much of a hit, Ubisoft may be less inclined to rely on licensed games and focus on its most popular in-house franchises, especially after getting £1 million from Tencent to open a new jointly owned subsidiary.
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