Update: Ubisoft has now walked back its statement that The Division's player base has returned to the size it was at launch.
"This was a miscommunication--what I meant to say is the numbers for The Division are trending back in a positive direction," Ubisoft's Anne Blondel told PCGamesN. "Thanks to what we've seen with patch 1.4 and other updates the team has delivered. What I should have said is, we think it's possible that The Division follows a similar pattern to Rainbow Six Siege, which has seen increasing engagement to the point that DAU numbers have equaled those we saw during the launch period."
Original Story: Following the release of its latest patches, Ubisoft's online shooter The Division is riding high again, it seems. The publisher said in a statement to PCGamesN (via DualShockers) that the number of daily active players has returned to what the game had at launch, suggesting the recent patches were successful in drawing people back.
"Since the release of patch 1.4, we went back to the daily active users we had at launch, because people were [so impressed]," Ubisoft VP of live operations Anne Blondel said. People came back, she said, in part because of Ubisoft's commitment to improving the game, even though that meant delaying its expansions (and the revenue associated with them).
"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," Blondel added. "And this is what we did [and] the community was super happy about it, even though they were disappointed at first that we were to push back the next DLC releases."
Part of Ubisoft's effort to improve The Division and its dialogue with fans was the launch of the game's public test server, where players can test new features before they are rolled out publicly.
The Division's latest paid expansion was Survival, which came out this month for Xbox One and PC, and lands on PS4 next month. The game's final add-on is Last Stand, which arrives in 2017. Following the 1.4 patch was another major one, 1.5, which came out alongside Survival.
In other Ubisoft news, Blondel recently said the publisher "wouldn't be the same" if Vivendi completes its hostile takeover bid of the Assassin's Creed company.