Ubisoft: Declining For Honor player base is "fake news"

We have previously reported that Ubisoft's For Honor has lost 95% of its Steam players, which has been verified by Steam's Game Stats service, but that doesn't prevent Ubisoft Montreal's Community Developer Eric Pope from outright denying it in the Warrior's Den livestream and calling it "fake news":

"We have a lot of players in For Honor - believe it or not, fake news people, we have a lot of players in For Honor - to roll it out to," he said.

Hopefully, Pope was trying to be funny about the whole situation, but it's of course still a weird thing to say from an official source without clarification. What do you make of this?

Thanks, VG247.