Battlefield 2042 enjoyed a huge surge in players over the weekend sparked by the game going free-to-play as well as meaningful improvements made over the last two years.
DICE’s first-person shooter launched in October 2021 and became one of the worst-reviewed games on Steam, with players pointing to myriad bugs and performance issues, controversial gameplay changes, and a lack of expected features.
The player count quickly declined after strong launch day concurrents and, at one point, more people were playing 2018’s Battlefield 5 than the more recent Battlefield 2042. Things got so bad that EA boss Andrew Wilson was forced to admit to investors that Battlefield 2042 "did not meet expectations".
DICE has stuck with the game though, issuing a number of improvements and continuing seasonal updates. This culminated with a free weekend across all platforms, which saw a peak of 102,009 concurrent players on Steam (Microsoft and Sony do not publish concurrent player numbers).
That’s just a couple of thousand concurrent players off Battlefield 2042’s all-time peak of 105,397 which it saw at launch. The free weekend was clearly targeted to go up against rival shooter Modern Warfare 3’s open beta, so its success is even more impressive given the stiff competition. At the time of this article’s publication, over 55,000 were playing Battlefield 2042 on Steam, making it the 12th most-popular game on the platform.
Publisher EA has signalled a bright future for Battlefield despite 2042’s failures. Ridgeline Games is a new Seattle-based studio creating the franchise's first single-player campaign since Battlefield 5 (Battlefield 2042 does not have a campaign mode of any kind). DICE is handling multiplayer, as you’d expect. Meanwhile, Ripple Effect, an evolution of Battlefield's DICE LA, is making a "completely different" Battlefield experience.
In August, Wilson said the next Battlefield game will be a "reimagination" of the series "as a truly connected ecosystem". He also said EA plans to "bring Battlefield back in an entirely new way in the future".
Until then, perhaps Battlefield 2042’s second life is worth jumping into.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
