Not a Christmas without a disappointing launch. In 2020 it was Cyberpunk 2077, and in 2021 the award went to Battlefield 2042. Both games are triple A, in both cases there were high expectations before their launch, and after their launch they have both garnered an endless stream of negative reviews, with only a few users pointing out the positive aspects and / or the possibilities for improvement of the same in the medium term.
And now they also have another element in common. And is that if many stores began to offer reimbursement for the title of CD Projekt Red last year, now it is Steam who has decided to offer that possibility to players who bought Battlefield 2042 and they have ended up most disappointed with the development of DICE on the EA franchise. And it is important to remember that this is not mucus of turkey.
As a general rule, Steam only allows the return of games with very strict conditions, referring both to the time elapsed since the purchase, as well as the time that the player has dedicated to it. 14 days and less than two hours, respectively, are the limits set by Valve to allow returns. However, in the case of Battlefield 2042, the company has decided to bypass that limitation, allowing any player to return it, even if they bought it more than 14 days ago and played it for more than two hours.
A quite understandable exception, on the other hand, and that is that if a few days after its launch the negative review count, only on Steam, already added more than 39,500 mostly negative reviews, at the time of writing this news the profile of Battlefield 2042 in the Valve store indicates that there are 116,042 mostly negative reviews. And what’s worse, in a few minutes reviewing it, I have already found several upvoted reviews that were actually sarcastic (such as one whose content is the recipe for Sirloin Wellington).
A few weeks after its launch, EA assigned Battlefield 2042 to the head of Apex Legends, in order to try to solve the crisis that began after the launch of the game. But nevertheless, multiple title issues are not something that can be solved quickly, and there are many users who are not willing to wait to see if EA is able to solve all the problems, something that in any case will still take a few months to happen.
Thus, the volume of players of the PC version on Steam has not stopped decreasing. As we can see in SteamCharts, ni am even capable of reaching 10,000 simultaneous players, something that should be a piece of cake for a triple-A from a popular franchise like this one. It is hard to understand why DICE and EA believed that Battlefield 2042 was now ready to hit the market, and to underestimate the reactions that a bad launch could elicit.
