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.
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.
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.
- 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.