Battlefield 2042 overtakes CoD’s Steam player count for 3 major reasons

Battlefield 2042 has more players on Steam than Call of Duty, but there are three main reasons why the four-year-old shooter has had such a huge player count jump.

At the time of writing, Call of Duty (which includes Black Ops 6 and Warzone) has 33,000 active Steam players according to SteamCharts, while Battlefield 2042 has 58,000. Over the past 24 hours, CoD peaked at 70,000 and BF 2042 peaked at 74,000.

Battlefield 2042 was slammed at launch by players and critics alike, with its player count taking a steep drop shortly after launch. It hasn’t surpassed 20,000 Steam players this year, but has shot up to 74,000 over the past two days.

Why Battlefield 2042 has more Steam players than CoD

There are three big reasons for this huge spike: Battlefield 2042 has a free Battle Pass with rewards to earn for Battlefield 6, it’s currently on sale for under $3, and lots of players are in AFK servers to grind the rewards without actually playing the game.

There are dozens of these AFK farming servers in the Portal mode, letting players idly get XP to complete the free pass and earn their rewards in Battlefield 6. So, while it does have more players logged in, not everyone is actually playing the game.

EA / Dexerto

Of course, some players will have either gone back to the game or are trying it out for the first time because they miss Battlefield 6’s beta, which ended on August 17.

Call of Duty, on the other hand, has just hit its lowest Steam player count ever. The numbers have been dwindling ever since Black Ops 6’s record-breaking launch (aside from a spike for Verdansk’s return in April), with the last 30 days being the lowest they’ve ever been.

Black Ops 6 is nearing the end of its lifecycle ahead of Black Ops 7, and there has been growing discontent with the wacky skins in the store and the anti-cheat.

Steam only makes up a small percentage of CoD’s player base, but as we saw in a report in May, the overall player count is following the same trend as Steam (but the actual numbers are vastly higher).

2025 is the first time Battlefield and Call of Duty are going up against each other since 2021, so we’ll need to see how Battlefield 6 and Black Ops 7 fare when they release in October and November, respectively.