Battlefield 2042 redemption continues as Steam player count overtakes Call of Duty

Battlefield 2042’s most recent season appears to have had the desired effect, as it transpires the shooter’s player count has remained high even after the conclusion of a recent free weekend.

To get you up to speed, Battlefield 2042 recently launched Season 6 earlier this month, and also on top of that held a free weekend that happened to coincide with a certain Modern Warfare 3 beta. However, despite that free to play weekend coming to an end on October 16, it seems players have stuck around with the FPS – with SteamCharts reporting that the game’s now sitting pretty at number 10, thanks to its current players on Steam count of 55,053 while Call of Duty’s stands at 48,873 as of October 18, 2023.

Of course, this isn’t quite a complete picture of Call of Duty’s PC player count, given that the game is also available on Activision’s own Battle.net service too. Likewise, Battlefield 2042 is also available via the EA Downloader. But the fact that these are the numbers on the most popular PC gaming platform is certainly a decent indication of the improvement of the shooter’s health, at least when it comes to player count.

EA’s FPS has had a well-publicised struggle during its lifespan, with the poor reception to the game’s launch back in October of 2021 even resulting in the game’s first post-launch season content being delayed for several months before finally releasing in the Summer of 2022. It’s slowly been trying to turn things around in subsequent seasons and across the next year or so, but never quite managed to breach the lofty heights that its biggest rival consistently enjoyed until now.

Season 6 brought about a raft of changes – with the Dark Creations season bringing with it new maps, new weapons and some fan-pleasing changes to the Engineer class. Whether Battlefield can maintain this momentum as we approach the Modern Warfare 3 release date this November is yet to be seen, but for now there’s certainly some fight in this rivalry yet.