By all accounts, Battlefield 2042 had a rough launch. It arrived with numerous technical issues, bugs, and balance problems that have led to the game receiving way more downward thumbs on Steam's review system than it has received thumbs-ups. In fact, as of the time of this writing, Battlefield 2042 has the dubious honor of being the ninth worst-reviewed game on Steam (Konami's eFootball is still firmly planted at number one on this list, in case you were wondering).
Yet despite all the bad press surrounding Battlefield 2042, it's still also one of Steam's most-played games. According to SteamDB, Battlefield 2042 is second for Trending Game and game most played over the past 24 hours, just behind Halo Infinite in both categories. It's the tenth most-played game in terms of peak concurrent players at the moment and 89th for Steam's highest peak concurrent player count of all time.
Bad reviews are almost certainly hurting Battlefield 2042 sales, but you gotta wonder what Battlefield's player counts would be if it actually received decent reviews on its release. Maybe it would have shot to the top of the charts.
to their credit, Battlefield developer DICE has been extremely transparent with fans on what they're doing to fix 2042's many issues. The studio has set up a dedicated Twitter channel to communicate coming changes and recently discovered issues, notifying players when certain items or abilities will be disabled and when updates might bring them back.
For example, the Prox Sensor was recently disabled to try and fix Battlefield 2042's rubber-banding issues. It seemed to help a bit, but the real fix was server-side updates and another update that should be arriving by the end of this week.
In addition to better server performance, this week's update will tackle issues with soldier revives not working, fixes the missing loadouts bug, re-enables the UAV-1, and adjusts vehicle balance on the LCAA hovercraft and MD540 Nightbird.