It’s no surprise Battlefield V has struggled since being released back in November 2018, but precisely how much are numbers down? And how much are they down in relation to previous Battlefield titles? – Today we’re going to take a look at the numbers and find out.
Note, that I actually find diving into the player data quite interesting, not just for Battlefield but for all games. The market is so saturated right now, and gamers have so much choice I think it’s a worthwhile exercise to keep the finger on the pulse, to peer through all the noise and hype and take a look at the numbers to find out what games people are actually playing, so stay tuned for future posts that cover more games. For now though, we are just focusing on Battlefield.
So first up, I set out to look at how Battlefield V data is stacking up, which I thought would be relatively easy. I have a handful of reliable resources for such a task, thanks to our friends over at Battletracker (https://battlefieldtracker.com) who I’ve been using for a while now, only to find that for some reason, there appears to be no such data for Battlefield V.
Remaining calm, I then consulted the oracle (Google) but subsequent searches for “Battlefield V player count” , “Battlefield V population” , “Battlefield 5 player count” etc, came up short of supplying me with anything close to the data I was looking for. I searched for a good hour trying to even get a reason as to why play count stats were apparently not happening with Battlefield V and all I found were Reddit pages with people asking the same question, with no answers being given. This was a reply to a post in the Official r/Battlefield sub Reddit about player statistics by another individual asking the same question. No answers given.

So, it appears getting any data at all on precisely how many people are playing Battlefield 5, sadly, is something that for some strange reason is simply unavailable for the general public. Like Area51 or Bigfoot, it is an anomaly with no readily available information it seems. Which, I have to say is pretty strange, especially considering there has been no problem at all retrieving this data in the past with any previous Battlefield titles (which we will see in a moment). But one does have to ask the question, why?
So with no data to go by I had no choice but to fire up the game and just take a look at the population and try and make some determinations as a means to simply get SOME kind of indication for this write up. And, well.. The diagnosis wasn’t good. After playing over a 72 hour period during what is, locally Easter school holidays, while there are people in servers playing, it appears Battlefield 5 is in serious trouble five months after its release. In fact most game modes are simply unplayable due to low player count. Even in “Conquest” traditionally the most popular of game modes apparently seems to be struggling to get full servers.
For some bizarre reason, every game mode I would try and play would give me this arbitrary 2 minute waiting time, after which the game would put me into an empty server.







So after spending several days trying to get a glimpse of Battlefield V data, it is obvious that this game has a serious player count issue five months after release, and despite my best efforts I was unable to get any real metric on player count, as it appears EA/Dice are trying very hard to not make that information public. Previous Battlefields however, thankfully have player data readily available. Starting with Battlefield 1.


As you can see, over the same time period, Battlefield 1 hit a peak of 20,762 players, with an average of around 17,000 over a 4 week period. Which aren’t bad numbers all things considered and it’s safe to assume, BF1 will remain a viable option for gamers at least for the next 6 months.
The real surprise though looking at the data, is Battlfield 4, which despite now being almost a 6 year old game, is still managing to attract considerable numbers to it’s servers. I did write about this phenomenon in a previous post which can be found here (https://www.news.thefrequency.com.au/battlefield-4s-continued-success-casts-long-shadows-over-the-franchises-future/)


The other interesting thing to note about Battlefield 4, is that although, it misses out on hitting Battlefield 1’s peak players by around a thousand players, when people do play BF4 they apparently play for longer, as BF4 manages to stay over the 20,000 player mark for longer, over the same “peak period” which for a game that has no less then 3 successive titles in front of it is a huge achievement, and a testament to the quality of the game considering its substantial longevity.
I didn’t spend too much time going into the analytics of Battlefield 3, but I did feel as though it needed an honorable mention. For a game that is now almost 8 years old, it is worth noting that you can still find full servers here in 2019
