Friday night peak numbers are in and we now see the free promo has had an effect.
@Tank2042Man wrote:Friday night peak numbers are in and we now see the free promo has had an effect.
But will it be able to retain the players?
@Tank2042Man wrote:
@NazT55No, that's a given, most players just like playing for free.
The best they can hope for is improving its tarnished reputation but browsing the main reddit sub it seems a lot of people are on a long term mission to keep trashing 2042 no matter what.
Very weird behaviour if you ask me.
Not weird to me. People are long terming the bashing because, as gently as I can, Dice seems hell bent on not EVER making this game what it was suppose to be...
Enticing BF2042 game owners to come back and new players to try it out for free, could all work brilliantly to give this BF2042 game a rebirth or a 'relaunch' if you will.
The challenge and question remains of course if the current version of the BF2042 game is up for it?
The most vivid and dedicated Battlefield Fans are those millions of customers that already bought the game one year ago. They have since left, because the game did not give them what they expected and seek of fun and long-lasting entertainment from a Battlefield game. So for them, it has remained 'free to play' all the time these last 12 months, but despite this, they have deserted the game and only a small subset of the players remain.
For the re-launch of the game to work (bringing back the players in large numbers, and keeping them coming back for more), then those first observed missing features and the long lasting fun needs to be there. So try now and run through the long lists of misses we made at game launch one year ago and observe if most can be positively confirmed to have been fixed/implemented, and we may be in for new era for BF2042.
I recall that we had some marketing push from EA/DICE back in early spring 2022 on the reason they gave for the very long delay from game launch and till the season1 dropped. Which was to fix a majority of the raised issues and to give the game the love it deserved with a major overhaul. Personally I was not convinced by the output we got when season1 finally came out. On the contrary, it came across as being very minimalistic.
In much R&D work that takes substantial investments of time, money and resources, we often refer to the definition of the Minimal Viable Product. E.g. the minimal level of features/functions/contents for it still to be useful and make a positive business case. I am not convinced we yet have the MVP in the current BF2042 game. Hence, I do not see these free to play efforts paying off in terms of bringing the game back to a healthy long-term sustainable player count and business.
This free to play period will however entice some thousands of players that didnt buy yet the game to potentially put it on their xmas wish list for their wealthier parents now to buy it for them. The incremental profits that EA makes from this are of course there, as the incremental costs to deliver these electronic copies online for download are minimal, as the commercial apparatus is already there for long to support it. So in pure business terms, this makes perfectly sense. And may also be the last shot left for EA/DICE to carve in more revenue from this game version.
Considering the quality of the product itself, the real challenge is if the brand name and reputation will be further damaged and still making it worthwhile when looking at the franchise long term...? Somehow I wish we could just please delete this BF2042 nightmare. Wipe the slate clean. And then get on with a new and proper contemporary Battlefield game instead, where all the basics are there from the get go.
I sooo wish we didnt need to have such discussions at this stage, 1+ year after the BF2042 game launch. But the player count numbers speaks for themselves and this is truly unprecedented times in the EA/DICE Battlefield world.
Saturday morning update. BFV is currently in the lead with 51,556.
Saturday peak picks up another few thousand.
On a related note, I was playing Exodus Conquest 64 Saturday afternoon in Australia and I didn't encounter any bots at the start of a round which normally happens a lot. So I suspect an influx of Aussies on next gen and PC are trying the game out.
Ok here's the peak for Sunday night using Oceania time. I just realised we are nearly 1 day ahead of LA!
So really this is the Saturday peak.
Final update, I guess the weekend must be over regardless of time zones as shown by the stats.
We saw the normal peak double in response to the free promotion and as we head into the Christmas period it will be interesting to keep an eye on the numbers.
