In a surprising turn of recent events, 2017’s Star Wars Battlefront II has seen a surge in players, with fans hoping it might finally lead to a third game in the series.
When Star Wars Battlefront II was released on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, to say it was a messy launch would be an understatement. The game itself was fine with a decent single-player campaign (a feature missing from the previous game) and fun multiplayer.
However, EA and DICE went hard on pushing players to grind for unlockable content to push them towards its egregious microtransaction loot boxes.
What’s more, those who were willing to splash the cash on top of the game that they’ve already bought had an increased chance of receiving special ability cards from the loot boxes with pay-to-win elements.
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EA and DICE later made Star Wars Battlefront II less of a grind and removed pay-to-win elements from its loot boxes with cosmetic goodies only, but it was already too little too late, and a lot of bridges with fans were burned.
This was a damn shame, because like I said, Star Wars Battlefront II had fun multiplayer whether it was on ground assaults or dog sights in an X-Wing. But at the end of the day, this was 100% the fault of EA and DICE.
Yet, nearly eight years after its original launch, Star Wars Battlefront II has seen a big surge in concurrent players.
As brought to our attention by Daily Star Wars Games on Twitter, Star Wars Battlefront II is on track to break its all-time concurrent player record on Steam with an increase of +285% in the last 30 days.
The all-time concurrent player peak for Star Wars Battlefront II was set just over four years ago with 10,489 players. At the time of writing, the 24-hour peak is 9,777.
Keep in mind that while these numbers may not seem massively impressive as a whole, this is just on the PC platform Steam, and not PlayStation or Xbox consoles. Plus, this game is nearly a decade old.
I’ve just looked at the PlayStation mobile app on my phone, and Star Wars Battlefront II is trending alongside the likes of GTA VI, GTA V, Call of Duty and a random indie game called Tralalero Tralala.
What’s more, Star Wars Battlefront II is also riding high on the Xbox charts with Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft and Call of Duty. It’s quite incredible.
EA has to be taking notice of the attention that Star Wars Battlefront II has been getting lately, and now more than ever, the possibility of Battlefront III releasing is looking increasingly likely. We’ll have our fingers crossed.
Now, if you excuse me, I’m off to download Star Wars Battlefront II, because I have an X-Wing to pilot.