Battlefield 2042 launched in 2021 about as successfully as a rocket with a hole in its side – the FPS crash-landed onto Steam with a legitimately historic number of negative reviews, failing even its own developers.
"They were disappointed on Battlefield 2042, too," Battlefield lead and EA manager Rebecka Coutaz recalls to Edge for its new magazine issue 415. "And, across all the studios, they did not want to allow this to happen again."
Having once had only 21% positive Steam reviews – it has since crept up to 46% positive, as of writing – Battlefield 2042 had the ignominious privilege of being one of Steam's worst-rated games in history. It's still in the bottom 100, in a slightly worse position than Monster Hunter Wilds. But Coutaz, who joined developer DICE two weeks after Battlefield 2042 came out, remembers its early days as "a difficult time."
"We had a lot of expectations from the community," she says, "and the players who have been with us for decades. So we owed some things to them – and, of course, to our teams as well." Four years later, "the game is in a completely different state than when we released it," Coutaz says, and she maintains that "we still have a lot of players playing." The game currently holds a record of 107,376 players according to SteamDB, which it reached almost two years ago.
In any case, Battlefield 6 isn't even out until October 10, but things already seem to be trending more positively for it. Its open beta period has already flung Battlefield 2042's peak player count into another galaxy, with 521,079 concurrents.
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