Battlefield 2042 is going through something of a rough patch at the moment, with the game dropping like a stone through the Steam Charts and its concurrent players dwindling by the day.
EA's military shooter stumbled right out of the gate when it came out in October 2021, launching with game-breaking bugs and a chaotic multiplayer experience that sacrificed quality for the sake of scale.
A particularly damning indictment of this AAA blockbuster is that its best-received mode is the one that allows you to revisit maps from the franchise's older installments, as fans are clearly yearning for the good old days.
Things have hardly improved much since then, with the game's lingering player base (a community that is shrinking fast) wondering how EA plan to salvage the situation.
Despite the fact that Battlefield 2042 has obvious room for improvement (even if they just focus on resolving the technical issues), there has been very little communication from the development team about their plans for the future.
In fact, there have only been three major updates since it launched.
Suffice it to say, the community is not especially pleased with the current state of the game and is investing a lot of time in chronicling its fall from grace. The Battlefield 2042 subreddit is not really a place where fans go to discuss their favorite strategies or share exciting gameplay clips, but rather a forum for indulging in schadenfreude.
If you scroll through the top posts, you will see people sharing funny stories about the title's lacklustre performance, complaining about various matchmaking woes and invisible walls that obstruct your shots, and even declaring that they have given up altogether and uninstalled the game.
'Battlefield 2042' Concurrent Player Count
Another popular topic among this Reddit community is that they like to track the game's position in the Steam charts and observe its diminishing player numbers.
One heavily upvoted post, written by u/BDFL, has likened this to a war for "Battlefield's soul". They argue that fans should be making their dissatisfaction clear to EA by dropping out of Battlefield 2042 right now and loading up the series' older entries instead.
The post reads: "Go forth and populate the older games [...] Show them that this pile of garbage is NOT what we as a player base want."
Whether it's a result of this campaign or just a natural fading of interest over time, Battlefield 2042 is not faring very well. At the time of writing, Steam has recorded just 5,122 active players in the game, which is down from the all-time peak of 100,590.
For a AAA blockbuster that is only a few months old, this is an unusually low number and it has been dropping at fairly regular intervals. On December 19, the game had 45,009 concurrent players on Steam, before then dropping sharply to around 30,000 the next day and then to just 17,500 on Christmas Day (when a new release like this ought to be thriving).
Of course, these figures are taken from Steam and do not reflect how popular Battlefield 2042 is on other platforms, such as PlayStation, Xbox or Origin. Still, it doesn't bode well, especially given that Steam is now handing out refunds.
What's more, prominent Battlefield leaker Tom Henderson (who has accurately reported on this game multiple times) has claimed that the flagship "Hazard Zone" mode is so badly populated now that EA has stopped internally tracking its stats.
'Battlefield 2042' Steam Charts Position
Perhaps the most telling sign of all, however, is that 2042 has now been overtaken by its own predecessor. Battlefield V (2018) is currently placed higher on the Steam charts than the newer game, boasting 13,651 concurrent players at the time of writing and a 24-hour peak of 18,828.
Even Battlefield 1 (2016) is on the cusp of taking over, as it managed to attract 4,997 gamers within the last hour (meaning it's just 125 players behind Battlefield 2042). For context, the Steam chart positions—which indicate what games are most popular on the platform—for each title are as follows:
As you can see, there is very little between Battlefield 2042 and Battlefield 1 right now and, if the former continues its downward trajectory, it could soon be surpassed.
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