EA continues to have a hard time with its flagship multiplayer first-person shooter, Battlefield 2042. While previous Battlefield games were known to have issues at launch, they usually recovered after some period of time. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case for Battlefield 2042, as the player count continues to slump day after day. Recently, it has hit a new record of falling just below 1,000 players on Steam for the first time.
Battlefield 2042 was released in November 2021 and is solely multiplayer, foregoing the single-player campaign of previous games in the series. Being multiplayer-focused, Battlefield 2042 heavily relies on player count, and this recent development clearly isn't a good sign for a game that has just been out for around six months, especially one that comes from a longstanding franchise such as Battlefield.
The news first came from a ResetEra forum member who was citing data collected by SteamCharts. At one point on April 11, there were just 979 people playing Battlefield 2042 according to SteamCharts. This marks the first time that Battlefield 2042's player count has dipped below 1,000 on Steam, and it seems incredibly dismal knowing that the previous game in the series, Battlefield 5, had over 9,000 concurrent players during the same period. It's worth noting that the data isn't representative of the overall player count, though, as Battlefield 2042 is also available on a variety of console platforms.
SteamCharts also shows that Battlefield 2042 has had, on average, 1,962 players over the last 30 days. Again, the number is significantly lower than what Battlefield 5 has been averaging over the past month, which is around 11,584 players. The player situation is so dire that Battlefield 2042 was even outperformed by two other older games in the series, Battlefield 1 and Battlefield 4.
Thankfully, DICE has already acknowledged some of the biggest criticism that was directed at the game. While Battlefield 2042 has yet to receive a Season 1 content update, it's already starting to receive some major changes. Recently, DICE responded to players' feedback and detailed its plans to address various map issues in Battlefield 2042, such as traversal, line of sight, pathing, and cover. This shows that DICE hasn't given up on Battlefield 2042 yet, even though its player base keeps on dwindling.
Battlefield 2042 is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: ResetEra