'Battlefield V' Currently Has 10 Times More Players Than 'Battlefield 2042'

Battlefield 2042 now has so few players on PC that even 2016's Battlefield 1 has completely and totally overtaken it.

Released towards the end of last year, it's become abundantly clear that Battlefield 2042 hasn't been the hit DICE and EA were hoping for. The futuristic military shooter has been riddled with bugs and server issues since launch, which has in turn led to negative reviews, unhappy fans, and a rapidly dwindling playerbase.

Earlier this month, Steam player numbers indicated that Battlefield 2042 players were giving up on the game in to go back to 2018's Battlefield V as the World War II shooter's numbers started to tick up, and even outdo the latest instalment.

A peek at SteamDB confirms things haven't gotten much better for Battlefield 2042. At the time of writing, the game has a little under 2,000 active players on PC. That's almost 10 times less than Battlefield V's 20,000, and less than half of Battlefield 1's 6,500. There's no way to sugarcoat it: this is a bad look for a game that came out just a few months ago, and a sign that DICE needs to do something fast if it wants to win players back over.

A steep decline in players isn't all Battlefield 2042 has to contend with at the moment. Late last week a disgruntled fan started a petition demanding that EA offer full refunds for the shooter on all platforms. In just a few days, that petition has soared to nearly 200,000 signatures.

"According to many consumer reports, Electronic Arts and DICE did not keep many promises made at launch, and Battlefield 2042 was launched as unplayable," the petition reads. "Even today, Battlefield 2042 has bugs that drastically change the in-game experience so much that it’s deemed an unfinished release by many community members."