That people were disappointed with the reboot of the Star Wars: Battlefront franchise isn't a secret. The simplification of the game's mechanics and the focus on graphical fidelity over everything else didn't sit well with many fans of the original games and while the game did manage to walk and talk like a Star Wars game, it lacked where it mattered. Now that the game has been out for a little bit, it becomes easier to get an overview of just how (un)successful the game ended up being, and it seems like the PC drew the shortest stick here.
Battlefront Stats, a website that tracks player activity in the DICE made online shooter set in a galaxy far, far away, sheds some light on the game's server population. At the time of writing this, the PlayStation 4 has managed to draw in the most players, with around 70.000 players coming back every day to shoot some blasters at some other people dressed in either white or brown. The Xbox One is in second place, with some 46.000 people playing within the last 24 hours. The numbers on the PC, however, are shockingly low, with only around 9,600 people being logged in during peak hours. Seems like PC players haven't been taking to Star Wars: Battlefront at all, even with the balance tweaks and free map DLC.
One wonders how fast that number may fall down even further with the slow stream of new content (most of which is locked behind the extremely expensive season pass). The disparity might be due to the game's more casual nature that seems to be more popular on consoles than on the PC platform, which has a ton of hardcore competitive shooters. This is not the first multiplayer-only game to have population problems on PC, with Titanfall and Evolve having a very inactive playerbase compared to their console versions.
The funny thing is that an EA community manager has disputed these numbers, calling them inaccurate.
https://twitter.com/sledgehammer70/status/696749331718627328
EA seems unwilling to go beyond claiming the statistics gathered by P-stats are inaccurate since they are not releasing any info regarding player population, going as far as to lock threads keeping score of the player population on their forums. Some responding to the tweet below are also wondering why it is that they are having trouble finding matches on PC. The closest thing to numbers EA will toss out is how well their recent Community Challenge went where in over a period of a week they challenged players across all devices to complete 3 million daily missions. Daily missions were introduced in January for Battlefront and include goals such as kill 30 enemies, or play a specific multiplayer mode so many times in a day. Over 4 million were accomplished in that time, but given each player could do some each day and it counts all platforms it fails to actually address the point
I've reached out to P-stats and asked where they get their stats from. A representative told this writer that they pull it directly from a non-public EA API every 5 minutes, but wouldn't tell me the specifications. We have also sent EA a message last week, but we did not get a response. I will update this article if and when we do. We weren't too impressed by the game either as you can read in our review right here.
PC Players! Why are you still/no longer playing this game? What can be done to get you to pick it back up again, if at all? Sound off in the comments and let us know!
