Short answer: yes, Battlefront II is still active, and comfortably so. Across nine days of counting, it held between 462 and 1,752 players on Steam at any given moment. EA stopped adding content to it in April 2020. It is still one of the busiest Star Wars games on the platform.
The number that actually decides your experience is not that one, though. It is which platform you buy it on, and we will get to why.
What we counted
| Day | Busiest | Quietest |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 25 | 1,326 | 486 |
| Aug 26 | 1,461 | 572 |
| Aug 27 | 1,177 | 615 |
| Aug 28 | 1,430 | 578 |
| Aug 29 | 1,673 | 906 |
| Aug 30 | 1,752 | 988 |
| Aug 31 | 1,366 | 534 |
| Sep 1 | 1,320 | 462 |
| Sep 2 | 1,284 | 532 |
The pattern is the one you would hope for: a firm weekend swell, evenings three times busier than the dead hours, and a floor that never drops under about 460 even at the worst moment of the week. A game nobody plays does not look like this. It looks like Battlefront (2015), which we also track, and which spent the same nine days between 9 and 47.
For scale, here is where it sat against the rest of the catalogue in a single reading on the evening of September 2:
| Game | Players at that moment |
|---|---|
| Zero Company (2026) | 37,972 |
| SWTOR (2011) | 4,768 |
| Empire at War (2006) | 1,529 |
| Jedi: Survivor (2023) | 1,223 |
| Battlefront II (2017) | 1,150 |
| Fallen Order (2019) | 698 |
| Outlaws (2024) | 612 |
| Battlefront (2015) | 31 |
A nine-year-old multiplayer shooter is holding its own against single-player games released last year, and burying its own predecessor by a factor of nearly forty.
The platform trap
Here is the thing that matters more than any of the numbers above, and that most "is it still alive" answers skip.
Battlefront II has no crossplay. EA said plainly it had no plans to add it, and the game's development ended without it. PlayStation players match with PlayStation players, Xbox with Xbox, PC with PC. Three separate populations that never see each other.
On PC, though, the storefront you buy from does not split you. Steam, the EA app and the Epic Games Store all run through EA's servers on the same account system, so our Steam count is a slice of the PC pool rather than the whole of it. And that pool is unusually large for a game this old, because in January 2021 EA gave the Celebration Edition away free on Epic for a week and enough people claimed it that EA had to spin up extra servers.
So: our 462 to 1,752 is the visible part of a bigger PC number. Whether the console populations are healthier or thinner than PC, we cannot see, and neither can anyone else without EA telling us.
What that means for getting into a game
The population supports the modes it always supported best. Supremacy and Galactic Assault are the big-player-count showcases and they are where a population of this size concentrates. Small, niche playlists are a different proposition at 500 players spread across regions and modes, and we cannot measure per-mode numbers from Steam's public figure, so we are not going to guess at them.
Practically: evenings and weekends, in a populated region, on the main modes, you will get a match. Three in the afternoon on a Tuesday, in an unpopular playlist, you may not.
So should you buy it?
For the multiplayer, yes, if you buy it on the platform your friends are on. The no-crossplay rule makes that the single most important decision in this whole article. Getting this wrong is how people end up thinking the game is dead.
The campaign is short and its reputation is deserved, which is to say it is not the reason to buy this. The multiplayer is.
Do not judge it by its launch reviews. Battlefront II scored a 68 and that number is a photograph of the 2017 loot-box disaster, not of the game that exists now. EA spent two years and 25 content drops rebuilding it, ended progression-for-money, and stopped with the Battle on Scarif update in April 2020. What is on sale in 2026 is the finished version. We went into this in more detail in the best Star Wars games of the Disney era.
It is frequently very cheap. At sale prices this is one of the easiest recommendations in Star Wars gaming right now.
Will the servers stay up?
They have been up for over six years past the end of content updates, and EA has given no indication of switching them off. Nothing lasts forever with publisher-hosted multiplayer, and we will not pretend to know EA's plans, but there is no signal today that this one is near the end.
How we count
- Our own readings of Steam's public concurrent-player numbers, taken every two hours across 16 Star Wars games. Nine full days of data as of September 2, 2026.
- Highs and lows are the extremes of the readings we caught. We sample every couple of hours, so true daily peaks are somewhat higher than the table.
- Steam only, and here that is a real limitation: EA app, Epic, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series players are all invisible to us. PC players share a pool across the three PC stores; console players do not share with anyone.
- Comparisons between games come from a single reading, so the games are measured against each other at the same instant.
- The rolling picture is in the Star Wars games people are actually playing right now.
