Electronic Arts can't catch a break. After spending years working on Battlefield 2042, the publisher's flagship multiplayer first-person shooter is bleeding players. More than six months after it was launched in late 2021, Battlefield 2042 has hit a new low, falling below 1,000 concurrent players on Steam.
It's not unusual for live-service titles to go through cycles of low player counts. However, the average number of players very rarely falls below the 4-digit mark. For a AAA title like Battlefield 2042, the expectations are even higher.
As a multiplayer-only game with zero single-player content, Battlefield 2042 needs to have more than just 1,000 players, but EA and DICE have had no luck attracting and retaining a sizable audience. It's gotten to the point that cheat makers are abandoning the game because it's not just worth the effort anymore. To make matters worse, the same data showed that Battlefield 5 had over 9,000 concurrent players in the same timeframe, which is just sad.
The worst part about Battlefield 2042's woes is that there's no silver lining. Returning to the data collected on SteamCharts, Battlefield 2042 has had an average player count of less than 2,000 over the last 30 days, which is lower than what Battlefield V, Battlefield 1, and Battlefield 4, each put up. It's never a good sign for the latest installment in a big-time franchise to have fewer players than its predecessor, not when the said older title suffered from similar issues at launch as well.