Star Wars Battlefront 2 earned a major accolade with a Guinness World Record, but it’s likely not an award publisher Electronic Arts is proud of, since it’s for posting the most downvoted comment on Reddit. An EA community manager posted the comment on Reddit in November 2017, the month of the game’s turbulent launch, defending the decision to lock key characters — like Darth Vader — behind hours of grinding, unless a player pays up. It’s to give players “a sense of pride and accomplishment,” the community manager said. And that anger was on top of the response to Star Wars Battlefront 2's loot box system, which were described by critics as "pay-to-win."
Controversy around the loot box system had even government regulators involved; both Belgian and Dutch gambling commissions investigated the game, and lawmakers in the U.S., Singapore, and the U.K. all looked into the game’s use of microtransactions and loot boxes. EA ended up pulling microtransactions before release, and later overhauled its monetization system. The company blamed the gaffe for EA not reaching its 10 million copies sales goals for Star Wars Battlefront 2.
Despite the launch issues, Star Wars Battlefront 2 has had a dedicated, passionate fanbase. It’s been five years since EA published its final update for the game, but thanks to an effort from the Star Wars Battlefront 2 community, the game is seeing more players than ever. The daily concurrent player totals on Steam increased dramatically on Star Wars Day, May 4th, and continued to boost from there, likely due to the May 24 “Resurgence Day” event put on by Kyber, a team that hosts dedicated Star Wars Battlefront 2 servers and mod support.
Though there have been some dips since then, interest in the game has, overall, grown. Star Wars Battlefront 2 reached a new all-time concurrent player peak — 35,892 players — on June 22, with a consistent 20,000 people online at any given time. And these numbers are just for Steam; the game is available on consoles and Windows PC on EA’s proprietary launcher, but concurrent player numbers are not easily available there. Mat Piscatella, from analyst group Circana, posted to BlueSky on June 10 that Star Wars Battlefront 2 was in the top 15 most-played games on both PlayStation and Xbox during the last week of May.
EA did not respond to Aftermath’s request for comment.
Kyber community and project manager Ethan Clark told Aftermath that the team feels a sense of “pride” and “accomplishment” to see the game’s playerbase grow. Clark said, “It was incredibly hard to watch as the game burst into flames when it launched in 2017. So many talented people poured their hearts and souls into Battlefront 2, only for it to stand at the centre of perhaps one of the most damaging controversies in gaming. I think enough time has passed for people to look beyond the game's previous flaws and see it for what it is now — a genuinely great game, which many now consider a timeless classic.”
Clark said that previously players had to coordinate online at specific peak times to be able to get enough people to fill lobbies, but “now, you can find a full lobby in any game mode, at any time of day, on any platform.” Not only that, but there’s a big population of lower level players playing Star Wars Battlefront 2 for the first time.
Clark said that Resurgence Day, during which players logged into Star Wars Battlefront 2 en masse on May 24, took six months of planning to get set up. ("Resurgence Day is more than just a day of gaming; it's a statement," Kyber wrote on its website.) The player base was actively declining, he said, but the game’s presence on social media was growing. “The main goal was to incentivise content creators to return and flood social media with brand-new Battlefront videos, memes, and events. We only needed a handful of creators to find success before more of them naturally turned their attention towards the game, starting a cycle of growth which we could begin to turn into a movement,” Clark said.
The date, May 24, was chosen a week prior. “Based on the combination of data available to us — and the gut feeling many of us shared — it was pretty clear that the natural boost caused by other Star Wars content and events would peak the following weekend,” Clark said. “Using that knowledge, we worked nonstop all week, doing our best to help the content and mod creation communities fire on all cylinders, pumping out viral content, sharing exclusive news, and keeping players engaged throughout.”
The Resurgence Day event occurring near Star Wars Day, Revenge of the Sith returning to theaters, Darth Vader returning to Fortnite alongside a big Star Wars event, a massive price cut making the game just $4, and the end of the second season of Andor made for the perfect storm of interest in playing a Star Wars video game. Even Dallas Mavericks player Kyrie Irving got in on the action by streaming Star Wars Battlefront 2 to fans.
Clark’s not taking credit for the massive surge, but noted that without the social media push, the new audiences may not have stuck around as long. He said he knows the resurgence can’t last forever, but Kyber will continue to demonstrate that “just because Battlefront 2's live service was cancelled doesn't mean the game must come to an end.” Modders keep adding new content, and Kyber is working to bring that to the multiplayer game “in a way that’s safe and accessible.”
The group also hopes that EA has noticed the effort. “Our one hope is that someone, with the power to make things happen, has received and understood that gamers want more Star Wars Battlefront,” Clark said.
