A recent sponsored Battlefield 2042 stream went rather poorly, leaving fans baffled and confused. Battlefield 2042 has been a sore subject for many franchise fans for a while now. After a poor launch that was filled with countless bugs and soulless content, many are giving up on the game and retreating back to older entries in the series. Even the much-maligned Battlefield 5 is finding a second life in the wake of 2042's launch.
Over Christmas, Battlefield 2042 had fewer players than Battlefield 5 on Steam. Despite being a much newer game, 2042 is struggling to maintain its current player base as the content is failing to appease players and the updates are rolling out rather slowly. As of right now, fans don't have much of an idea of what the future of Battlefield 2042 even looks like due to DICE being preoccupied with trying to patch the game into a more acceptable state. Nonetheless, EA is doing its best to try and promote Battlefield 2042.
Twitch channel Battlefield 2042 has no scoreboard right now, so Crown had to use its own custom scoreboard to track the streamers' progress, highlighting just one of the game's many issues. To make it worse, during the stream, four players got stuck under a staircase and instead of acknowledging the bug, they just awkwardly stumbled over their words until they got loose. Following the backlash to the stream, the channel has also disabled comments on the YouTube of the stream. The stream was also posted to Reddit by luckybaseball with other s alleging that the stream's 25k viewers mostly consisted of bots due to a lack of activity in the chat.
Of course, this is nothing more than speculation and is difficult to prove, but Battlefield fans are still frustrated. EA is shelling out money to promote its game with streams with people who don't even play Battlefield, seemingly in an effort to win over new players than appease those who already love the series. For a game that was touted as a love letter to the franchise, many feel it has been the exact opposite.
Now, there are rumors that Battlefield 2042 will go free-to-play, signaling an early death cry or white flag for EA's biggest game of 2021. Nothing has been confirmed, but the rumor comes from reputable sources and suggests it's being considered. Whether the franchise can recover after Battlefield 2042's unfortunate launch remains to be seen, but it'll likely need more than some sponsored streams to win back series veterans.
Sources: Crown/Twitch, Ralfzer0/Reddit, IKnowNoBetter/Reddit, luckybaseball/Reddit
