Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora sees a boost in players after Avatar: Fire and Ash’s box office domination, and the addition of a surprisingly decent DLC drop and update

The world has gone blue once again. James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash is torching the box office, having already passed the $1 billion global mark and probably kickstarting serious conversations about Avatar 4 and 5 (both are written but waiting for the green light). And it looks like 2023’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is also benefitting from some brand synergy.

Against all expectations, the Massive Entertainment-developed and Ubisoft-published game failed to find a sizable audience after it launched. Considering The Way of Water, the second Avatar movie, had absorbed $2.3 billion worldwide at the box office in 2022, it was a surprising flop for Ubisoft. For the first time, Eywa didn’t show up to save the day.

Fast-forward to early 2026, less than a month after the release of Fire and Ash’s and the arrival of the game’s new From the Ashes DLC, and we’re looking at a different picture: via the charts on SteamDB, we can see the game was averaging around 2,000 concurrent players. Over the Christmas holidays and into January 2026, it’s broken its all-time peak player record several times, with the highest count now being 15,283 concurrents. We don’t have the data for the Ubisoft Connect platform or the console versions of the game, but social media chatter is indicating the change of tide isn’t limited to just Steam(a metric the Splitgate devs would like us to keep in mind).

Since Ubisoft announced that Frontiers of Pandora would be getting further post-launch support in the shape of a much-requested third-person mode, New Game Plus, and a standalone DLC which tied into the third movie, buzz surrounding the open-world action-adventure game has been more positive. With the recent updates delivering on those promises and the expansion taking things into a darker and more cinematic territory with a different protagonist, the result isn’t super surprising, but it’s still nice to see a “dead game” getting a second shot at finding an audience, especially when it’s part of such an internationally-renowned franchise.

For all its faults, Ubisoft has been excelling at bringing troubled games back from the dead or partial failure. For Honor may be the most glowing example of such an approach, but even Rainbow Six Siege and The Division (both entries) faced rough beginnings. Even Skull & Bones is getting a shot at redemption. With Disney and a massive IP behind it, the Na’vi-centric open-world game always had a fighting chance, but its future was uncertain after the original DLC plans were wrapped up.

From my perspective, the best part is the paid From the Ashes expansion (which I’m currently playing through) isn’t just more of the same, as it actually takes the familiar formula in a different direction that feels more focused and rawer in its approach to combat encounters, stealth, and character abilities. By focusing on a warrior character we already knew from the base game, So’lek, and the Ash clan of Na’vi who reject Eywa (on top of evil human invaders, of course), the DLC quickly finds its own voice and hits surprisingly hard, too.

Whether you enjoy the Avatar movies or think they don’t live up to the potential of Pandora as a setting, I sincerely think Frontiers of Pandora is one of the most stimulating open-world games of this generation, and a truly stunning tech showcase worth checking out. More than two years later, it might be finally getting the recognition it deserves.