Battlefield 2042 player numbers remain high after free weekend and discount

Is it yet another DICE turnaround after a disastrous launch? Battlefield 2042 is consistently getting above or close to 100,000 concurrent players on Steam during peak gaming hours at the moment, essentially matching its player count at launch. In the previous months, the game had 15,000 concurrent players at maximum and hovered at around 10,000 or below most of the time, according to Steam Charts, making this a significant jump.

After the catastrophic launch of Battlefield 2042, EA and DICE put in the work with consistent updates that incorporated community feedback on many issues, even going so far as to make changes to core gameplay systems like the specialists that initially replaced classes.

It seems all that was needed for potential players to recognize that effort was an opportunity to come and try out those changes, which finally came when Battlefield 2042 had a free weekend recently on Steam. Player numbers soared as interested gamers filled the servers to check the state of the game – and it seems like many of them stuck around, either returning to the game or purchasing it.

That was made easier by a hefty discount on the game, which is still active until October 26, 2023, and decreases the first-person shooter’s price by 84% for the Standard Edition and by 67% for the Elite Edition. Find Battlefield 2042 on Steam.

It’s almost a typical story for DICE at this point, the fantastic Battlefield 1 aside, to bungle the newest Battlefield title’s launch and then put in a lot of effort to turn things around. Many fans stated that this is how the game should’ve been feeling in the first place when it was released over two years ago in October 2023.

This upswing seems to be a PC-only phenomenon for the moment as Battlefield 2042’s console versions haven’t benefited from this development yet.

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