Battlefield 2042 loved an enormous surge in gamers over the weekend sparked by the sport going free-to-play in addition to significant enhancements made during the last two years.
DICE’s first-person shooter launched in October 2021 and have become one of many worst-reviewed video games on Steam, with gamers pointing to myriad bugs and efficiency points, controversial gameplay adjustments, and an absence of anticipated options.
The participant rely rapidly declined after sturdy launch day concurrents and, at one level, extra folks had been enjoying 2018’s Battlefield 5 than the newer Battlefield 2042. Issues acquired so unhealthy that EA boss Andrew Wilson was compelled to confess to traders that Battlefield 2042 “didn’t meet expectations”.
DICE has caught with the sport although, issuing a variety of enhancements and persevering with seasonal updates. This culminated with a free weekend throughout all platforms, which noticed a peak of 102,009 concurrent gamers on Steam (Microsoft and Sony don’t publish concurrent participant numbers).
That’s simply a few thousand concurrent gamers off Battlefield 2042’s all-time peak of 105,397 which it noticed at launch. The free weekend was clearly focused to go up towards rival shooter Fashionable Warfare 3’s open beta, so its success is much more spectacular given the stiff competitors. On the time of this text’s publication, over 55,000 had been enjoying Battlefield 2042 on Steam, making it the twelfth most-popular sport on the platform.
Writer EA has signalled a shiny future for Battlefield regardless of 2042’s failures. Ridgeline Video games is a brand new Seattle-based studio creating the franchise’s first single-player marketing campaign since Battlefield 5 (Battlefield 2042 doesn’t have a marketing campaign mode of any sort). DICE is dealing with multiplayer, as you’d anticipate. In the meantime, Ripple Impact, an evolution of Battlefield’s DICE LA, is making a “utterly completely different” Battlefield expertise.
In August, Wilson mentioned the subsequent Battlefield sport will probably be a “reimagination” of the collection “as a very linked ecosystem”. He additionally mentioned EA plans to “carry Battlefield again in a wholly new means sooner or later”.
Till then, maybe Battlefield 2042’s second life is value leaping into.
Wesley is the UK Information Editor for IGN. Discover him on Twitter at @wyp100. You’ll be able to attain Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.