Short answer: on Steam, it is very quiet. Across nine days of counting, Star Wars Squadrons sat between 22 and 85 players at any given moment, usually somewhere in the thirties or forties.
That sounds like an obituary. It mostly is, with two real caveats that change what you should do about it.
Updated October 3, 2026: another month of counting, two $3.99 sales and the game's sixth birthday. The new numbers are in the section below; everything after it is the original September 1 piece.
Update, October 3: six years old, $3.99, and still quiet
Squadrons turned six on Friday with no word from EA or Motive, and even at $3.99 it tops out around 100 players at once on Steam. Saturday afternoon reached 123, the most we have seen since we started counting in August, while the small hours still sit in the twenties and thirties. A cheap price fills the weekend peaks and leaves the quiet hours about where they were.
Here is everything since the original piece, week by week:
| Week | Average daily peak | Busiest | Quietest |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 2 to 5 (four days) | 53 | 75 | 23 |
| Sep 6 to 12 | 64 | 80 | 23 |
| Sep 13 to 19 | 72 | 115 | 20 |
| Sep 20 to 26 | 93* | 114* | 26* |
| Sep 27 to Oct 3 | 87* | 123* | 21* |
And the last seven days, through the birthday and the start of Steam's Autumn Sale:
| Day | Busiest | Quietest |
|---|---|---|
| Sun Sep 27 | 108* | 44* |
| Mon Sep 28 | 80* | 34* |
| Tue Sep 29 | 62* | 31* |
| Wed Sep 30 | 59* | 24* |
| Thu Oct 1 | 88* | 27* |
| Fri Oct 2 | 92* | 21* |
| Sat Oct 3 | 123* | 42* |
Our tracker has a hole from the morning of Sunday, September 20 to Saturday, September 26, and caught only one reading a day on several days after that, so every starred figure comes from SteamCharts' hourly readings of the same Steam count. Where the two overlap, their daily highs land within about 15 players of each other. Days run midnight to midnight Central.
What $3.99 did
Squadrons has been $3.99 (90 percent off $39.99) twice in three weeks. EA's own Steam sale had it at that price by Wednesday, September 16, and ended on September 28. Steam's Autumn Sale brought the same price back at noon Central on Thursday, October 1, and it runs to October 8.
Both sales moved the peaks. In the two weeks before EA's sale, daily highs averaged 59; during it they averaged about 90, and every weekend day cleared 100 (115 on Saturday the 19th, 113*, 114* and 108* after that). The weekends before the sale had topped out between 63 and 75. When the price went back to $39.99, the next two days peaked at 62* and 59*, right where it started. The Autumn Sale's first three days ran 88*, 92* and then 123* on Saturday.
The floor barely moved. The quietest hour of the day averaged 29 players before EA's sale and 35 during it, and Friday's birthday dipped to 21* in the early hours. Sales bring people in for an evening; they do not keep a crowd online around the clock.
Nothing for the birthday
Squadrons launched on October 2, 2020. EA and Motive marked the sixth anniversary with nothing we could find: no post on EA's Squadrons news page, and nothing from the developers in the game's Steam news feed since May 2025. That fits a game that was built to be finished, as the caveats below explain, but it does mean no event, no playlist and no reason beyond the price for lapsed pilots to come back this week.
Should you buy it at $3.99?
Yes, for the campaign and VR alone. $3.99 matches the lowest price it has been on Steam, and neither of those needs anyone else online. Treat multiplayer on PC as a weekend thing: on Steam the busiest stretch is early to mid afternoon Central on Saturdays and Sundays, which is evening in Europe, and weekday nights are thin. Crossplay helps, because the console, EA app and Epic players we cannot count share that queue. The sale price ends at noon Central on October 8.
What we counted
| Day | Busiest | Quietest |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 25 | 53 | 22 |
| Aug 26 | 49 | 26 |
| Aug 27 | 50 | 28 |
| Aug 28 | 44 | 29 |
| Aug 29 | 66 | 46 |
| Aug 30 | 85 | 37 |
| Aug 31 | 48 | 27 |
| Sep 1 | 44 | 24 |
Weekends roughly double it. Sunday evening was the high point at 85, and even that is a small number for a multiplayer game.
For scale, in one reading on September 1 the quiet end of the Star Wars catalogue looked like this:
| Game | Players at that moment |
|---|---|
| KOTOR (2003) | 158 |
| Battlefront II (2005) | 93 |
| Jedi Academy (2003) | 38 |
| Squadrons (2020) | 30 |
| Battlefront (2015) | 23 |
| Republic Commando (2005) | 16 |
A 2020 game with a marketing campaign behind it is being outdrawn on Steam by a twenty-three-year-old RPG. That is the honest picture.
The two caveats that matter
Steam is a slice, and a smaller slice than usual here. Squadrons shipped on PS4, Xbox One, and on PC through three different stores: Steam, EA's own app and the Epic Games Store. It also supports crossplay. So the people we can count are a fraction of the people in the matchmaking pool, and the pool is what actually determines whether you get a game.
It was never meant to run forever. EA Motive built Squadrons as a complete, one-off product rather than a live-service title. A handful of post-launch updates arrived and then support wound down, by design rather than by failure. Judging it as an abandoned live game slightly misses the point: it was finished.
So should you buy it?
For the campaign and for VR, yes, without hesitation. The single-player story is self-contained and the VR support remains one of the best reasons to own a headset if you like Star Wars. Neither depends on anyone else being online.
For multiplayer, go in with clear eyes. Crossplay means the queue is bigger than our Steam numbers suggest, and people do still get matches, especially at weekends and in the evenings. But this is not a game you buy expecting an instant match at three in the afternoon on a Tuesday.
It also goes on deep discount regularly, which changes the maths considerably. At full price it is a hard sell for the multiplayer alone. At sale prices, the campaign and VR justify it on their own.
October 3: it is $3.99 in Steam's Autumn Sale until October 8. The update at the top of this page has what that price has done to the player count.
How we count
- Our own readings of Steam's public player numbers, taken every two hours across the Star Wars catalogue. Nine days of data as of September 1, 2026.
- The October 3 update adds September 2 to October 3. Days our tracker missed are filled from SteamCharts' hourly readings and marked with an asterisk.
- Comparisons come from a single moment, so the games are measured against each other fairly.
- Steam only, and for this game that is a real limitation: PS4, Xbox, the EA app and Epic players are all invisible to us, and crossplay means they share a queue with the players we can see.
- The wider picture, updated as we go, is in our player-count coverage.