BF5 Player Count Report 2020

Updated:

24 Jun 2020

The writing's always been on the wall.

It's been almost two years since Battlefield V's launch, and the road to get here has been, in a word, rough. It's evident to all that DICE's latest entry did not perform as everyone had hoped, whether it be because of the early lack of content, egregious monetization, or poor prioritization of features. While the game did have a sizable following at launch, it quickly fell apart once the player's realized just how under-baked Battlefield V was. Here we've listed the latest information we could find about player count and how active the community is.

10. As of February 2019, Battlefield V sold 7.3 million copies.

Now most developers would be absolutely thrilled to know their game sold a million copies, let alone seven. But despite the impressive numbers, publishing giant Electronic Arts was more than dissatisfied. During an earnings call, EA lamented that their sales were just one million copies short of their projections. However, the community already held suspicions due to EA's reluctance to gloat about their sales numbers, a common tactic of theirs that was noticeably missed.

Source:
https://www.gameinformer.com/2019/02/05/ea-battlefield-v-did-not-meet-sales-expectations

9. The Battlefield V subreddit has 207,590 active members

This is almost twice as much as Battlefield 4's, but the sentiments tell a much different story. If you go on the BFV subreddit, you will encounter post, after post, after post by a frustrated and frankly defeated community. It's kind of sad, to be honest; there's an air of disappointment and longing underneath all the memes. This isn't to say that's all there is. You've definitely still got your regular discussions, guides, pleas to DICE, and the like, but it's hard not to notice the dour mood.

Source:
https://www.reddit.com/r/BattlefieldV/

8. The BF5 forums have over 27,000 discussions

There's still quite a bit of activity on these forums, but the general mood is more or less the same as on Reddit. Doom-and-gloom, judging from the posts, is quite evident. DICE seems more active/responsive on their boards, with polls, giveaways, contests, plus ample opportunity for players to provide direct feedback – but it still can't hide the overall displeasure.

Source:
https://forums.battlefield.com/en-us/categories/battlefield-v-general-discussion

7. There's still enough people to quickly get into a game… for now.

But this really only applies to the more popular game modes like Breakthrough, Conquest, Domination, and Team Deathmatch. It's the ones like Outpost, Airborne, and sometimes Rush that you might have to wait a while for a server to fill up. You can alleviate this by hopping to other server regions, but it's a steep price to ask players to sacrifice ping just to play their favorite game modes.

Source:
Check gallery

6. Battlefield V has a lackluster community/private server program.

One of the most universal complaints about Battlefield V was the complete absence of rentable, customizable private servers. This was seen as a huge step backward for the franchise that was built on the tightknit player-to-player community. The idea of letting players create their own game modes and rules with their friends seems like a no-brainer, but obviously, EA had other priorities. The silver lining, if you can call it that, is that DICE did eventually add custom servers in December of 2019. But this was too little, too late – the dwindling player numbers plus the absolute barebones customization afforded left many a bad taste in the community's mouth.

Source:
https://www.vg247.com/2019/12/06/battlefield-5-community-games-custom-servers-details-launch-date/#:~:text=DICE%20has%20finally%20detailed%20Battlefield,own%20games%20with%20desired%20settings.

5. The official Battlefield Discord has over 13,000 members.

Since there is no official server just for Battlefield V only, it can be difficult to pinpoint just how many are regularly online. However, there are quite a bit of "homegrown" servers belonging to a plethora of clans and people just looking to link-up. You'd be surprised just how many there are for each language ranging from Spanish all the way to Turkish. It's nice to see that the global community hasn't totally given up… yet.

Sources:
https://disboard.org/servers/tag/battlefield-v
https://discord.com/channels/140933721929940992/500058972234055710

4. There's a small e-sports scene, but it needs a lot of work.

Surprisingly enough, there is quite an extensive 'underground' competitive scene, even though DICE scrapped the official 5v5 game mode similar to Battlefield 1's 'Incursions' in August of 2019. According to competitive player Ollyyh,

"[The scene] Needs exposure and less cheaters with [mouse and keyboard (on console)]. There needs to be less leagues, and what I mean by that is there are so many small leagues where what we need is a few big leagues like ESB and CGL. This is also because each league has its own ruleset, which is frustrating as a player. Exposure could be done by Dice or EA promoting it and supporting leagues, promoting competitive live streams. More players are needed, but there is a big skill gap between pub players and comp players, and such a divide between them plus many players who may be good enough are put off by the toxicity in the community. Competitive could have got bigger since BF1 but no custom servers on day one of release set it back, and the overall performance of the game means more players are leaving the game than joining..."

Source:
https://esport-battlefield.com/
https://www.ea.com/games/battlefield/battlefield-5/news/battlefield-v-update-ryan-mcarthur?isLocalized=true

3. Battlefield V is quite a popular topic on YouTube…

But not really in the way DICE or EA would want. If you look up the reveal trailer, it has an overwhelming 549,000 dislikes to 352,000 likes compared to Battlefield 1's 2.3 million likes to 45,000 dislikes. If you look up 'battlefield 5' in YouTube's search, the results speak for themselves. For every montage and weapon guide, there three others with questioning the game's longevity or if it even had any, to begin with – a category of videos that dissect 'dead' games are also quite common.

Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=battlefield+5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb1MR85XFOc

2. There's quite a bit of developer engagement, in more ways than one.

Although bittersweet, the final 7.0 Update revealed that there was still some semblance of support for the game but also that the potential Battlefield V had was ultimately squandered. The DICE community team, for the most part, has maintained a decent level of communication lately, but it wasn't always that way. As said earlier, they do frequent the official forums and Reddit, but as more developers switch to future projects or outright leave the closer we get to complete radio silence.

If you look on Glassdoor, a site for employees to leave anonymous reviews of companies they've worked at, you'll find an interesting trend: most reviews before are lukewarm to very positive. However, reviews from December 2018 to September 2019 (coincidently the period directly after launch) are almost all negative - with many citing excessive crunch, cronyism, and nepotism among management.

Sources:
https://www.glassdoor.ca/Reviews/DICE-Sweden-Reviews-E598397.htm
https://forums.battlefield.com/en-us/categories/battlefield-v-general-discussion
https://www.reddit.com/r/BattlefieldV/

1. We'll never know all official player counts.

Ever since launch, DICE and EA have been very stingy with their player counts, especially on PC, an early red flag for the community. For companies that usually aren't shy about flaunting their success, EA and DICE were suspiciously quiet. Add the fact that you can get accurate player counts all the way back to Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Even Battlefield: Hardline had its numbers released. But now that Battlefield is back on Steam as of June, we'll at least have some idea of how much the numbers dwindle.

Source:
https://steamcharts.com/app/1238810 - notice that this is only for players that have purchased Battlefield V on Steam and not Origin; as such these numbers do not accurately reflect lifetime players.

Now that we're at the end of Battlefield V's life cycle, all we can really do is wait on what DICE has next. Many players, myself included, are hopeful the developers can learn from their mistakes and deliver the polished experience that fans expect.