It’s been almost two months since the release of Battlefield 2042, and things are not looking good for the latest mainline game in the franchise. A prominent insider reports that, due to the staggeringly low player count for the Battlefield 2042 Hazard Zone game mode, developer DICE is no longer tracking its statistics internally. In fact, DICE hasn’t been tracking the game mode past a week after Battlefield 2042 launched back in November 2021.
Why is Battlefield 2042’s player count so low for Hazard Zone?
Hazard Zone is the Battlefield franchise’s take on the popular Extraction genre. Similar to games like Escape from Tarkov, players drop into an area and must collect Data Caches whilst fighting AI enemies and other player squads. There are also a limited number of extraction points, which theoretically adds to the tension and competitive aspect of the game.
However, fans were quick to notice that the game mode offered little in the way of incentive. While players could use the collected data to buy weapons and gear for the next go-around, that was pretty much it. Players soon found that they had an excess of data to buy things, even if they hadn’t successfully extracted. Worse yet, because Battlefield 2042 still doesn’t feature an in-game voice chat, fans were left confused as to how they were supposed to communicate with their teammates in such a team-based game mode.
According to reliable insider Tom Henderson, this has reportedly left DICE with no reason to continue internally tracking the game mode’s statistics. As a whole, Battlefield 2042‘s player count has dipped down to around 6,000 concurrent players in the past week — far below its initial peak of 100,000 players on launch. Henderson also speculates that this likely means fans won’t be seeing any further support for the mode any time soon:
There's that few players in Hazard Zone that they didn't even bother to report statistics internally on it after Thanksgiving (Day 7 after worldwide launch).
So yeah, Hazard Zone is an unsurprising bust and I wouldn't expect support on it.
— Tom Henderson (@_Tom_Henderson_) January 10, 2022
In other news, Spider-Man: Miles Morales beat out Call of Duty: Vanguard as the highest-selling PS5 game in December. Rumor has it that Sony changed the developer for the long-awaited Twisted Metal reboot, but there’s no information on who the mysterious new studio could be.
