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Star Wars Battlefront 2 sees massive player surge years after controversial launch [1]

['Grant St. Clair']

Date: 2025-05-23

It's a May 4th miracle. Star Wars: Battlefront 2 (the new one, not the 2005 one) was a really solid core game mired with a bizarre, exploitative microtransaction system that was so legendarily bad it produced the most downvoted comment in Reddit history from a hapless developer trying to defend it. Eventually, the microtransactions were patched out, leaving a sprawling, beautiful Star Wars battle sandbox with no strings attached… but by then, the damage was done, and the game faded away into relative obscurity.

…Until now. Between Andor reminding people that Star Wars can still be really good, the Revenge of the Sith reissue reminding people that clone troopers are badass as hell, and Fortnite making its Star Wars microtransactions even worse, Battlefront 2 seems to have hit its perfect storm. Across the weekend, player counts crossed the hundred thousand mark for the first time since 2021, and have gone strong all week.

I've heard from a reliable source that Star Wars Battlefront II spiked to over 100,000 concurrent players after May 4th, and it's still holding strong at 80–90k!



That means millions are playing every week — Incredible for a game that hasn't had an update in 5 years. pic.twitter.com/1JEQyz3dA6 — BattlefrontUpdates (@SWBFUpdates) May 20, 2025

Naturally, these metrics have reignited calls for a Battlefront 3, which was cancelled early in development due to both 2's lackluster reception (to put it lightly) and a shift in focus and resources to EA's Battlefield 5, which took precedence at the time. Not that a petition is even going to register on EA's radar, but there's just something special about the (fixed) Battlefront 2 – the scale of the massive, sprawling battles, the X-Wings screaming overhead, the lasers flying in all directions around you – that other multiplayer shooters just haven't given me.

For everyone's sake, I really hope those half-assed remasters aren't the last games Battlefront fans ever get.

[END]
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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2025/05/23/star-wars-battlefront-2-sees-massive-player-surge-years-after-controversial-launch.html

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