Battlefield 2042 ► Game Director Speaks Out on Future of The Franchise

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@BFB-Praetorian wrote:
@CyberDymeHow do we know there's 10,000?

I've been struggling to work out how large the player base is with only Steam to go off.

I was about to pick a PS5 copy up for £30, which I think is a fair price for the game.
But if it's tanking even harder than I thought then I'll hold out and see if I can get a bargain.

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He's making the mistake of assuming that the Steam base is the entire player base. Only EA/DICE know how many PC installs are through Origin and how many players are playing on Playstation and Xbox editions of the game

If we assume that the proportions of Steam players (not absolute numbers) are broadly reflective of the engagement trends across all platforms, then the title of the video and the thread where the numbers are repeated and the thesis - that 2042 has lost over 90% of its playerbase - is false in the most basic way: It gets simple facts wrong. Arguably, the mistake -- taking all-time low player count and suggesting that this is a permanent loss of player-base -- is so egregious that I wonder if it's not deliberate. No one can really be that stupid, can they? I'll let you and everyone else be the judge of that.

Comparing like-for-like, the Steam charts show a net loss of about 64% percent of peak concurrent players over the all-time peak (as of time of writing), which is by no means good, but not the gaming apocalypse implied by the thread and video title. This is because the charts do not show, for instance, length of engagement or unique logins. Take the interpretation of the Steam figures in the video with a large pinch of "that particular 'content creator' is innumerate." 

The video is a great example of why no one should get their news from YouTube without checking it. It is disappointing that this claim has since been repeated as "the truth" and has been repeated without even a scintilla of rational thinking, such as, you know, checking the numbers that form the premise of the claims made.

With regard to the matchmaking times, I wonder how much time people consider too long to wait for a match, and at what times. During afternoons and evenings on PC in the UK, the matchmaking takes less than ten seconds for me. There may be issues with the matchmaking on the consoles, however, so I can't speak to that.