In the ongoing saga of how low can it go, Battlefield 2042 has set another unwanted record. The game has dipped below 1000 concurrent players for the first time ever on Steam. According to Steam Charts, the player count dropped below the 1000 figure earlier today, April 11. Even the 24-hour peaks for the game over the past week have dropped below 2000 on multiple occasions. Battlefield 4, a nearly 10-year-old game, has had higher 24-hour peaks for much of the past week.
Battlefield 2042 has been hemorrhaging players since it was first released late last year. The game was launched with key features missing, poor map design, a lack of game modes, and there has been heavy criticism from fans of the franchise for straying away from the realism of previous games in the franchise. However, nobody could have predicted that Battlefield 2042 would lose this many players so quickly. Battlefield V had a very rocky launch and, although that game was turned around, it never got as bad as this.
The scale of the player drop-off is truly staggering for a AAA game. When the game launched in November it averaged 51,000 players. Within a month that average dropped by 60% to 20,000. Another month saw the game lose yet another 60% of its average player count down to just 7,800 in January. Even after hitting just 2,000 average players in March, the count is still trending down.
Battlefield 2042 doesn’t even have its first season to of content to help it out. That was delayed until the summer while Dice scrambled to try and fix the laundry list of issues in the game first. At this point, it wouldn’t be unfair to question if it is even worth releasing a season of content in the summer. By then the game could have a few hundred players at most.