Six years after its launch, Battlefield 1 has 10x the player count of disastrous Battlefield 2042

Battlefield 2042 isn't very good, is it? Even at launch, we knew. It quickly became one of the worst-reviewed games on Steam. It had misaligned hitboxes. It was optimised poorly. Our review from Sherif put the boot in quite hard, and even the self-confessed Battlefield apologist admitted he couldn't stick it out through the terrible launch.

And here we are, almost a year later, and we're seeing the entire Battlefield fanbase operate with the same sentiment. The game is so bad that all the players you'd expect to be glued to the latest title have instead wandered off to play Battlefield 1. Over the past 24 hours, the 2016 game has attracted a tasty 51,000 concurrent players on Steam – its all-time user high (according to SteamDB).

Meanwhile, Battlefield 2042 is chugging away at a measly 5,300 over the past 24 hours, basically 1/10 of what its six-year-old peer is enjoying. And it's no surprise, really: EA has tried, and failed, to resuscitate Battlefield 2042 lately. But even the much-hyped Battlefield 2042 Liquidators event was taken offline less than an hour after going live. BF2042 just can't catch a break.

It also helps that Battlefield 1 has seen an eye-watering discount on Steam recently. You can pick the game up right now for just $4.79/£4.19 – less than the price of a pint (in London, at least). The game is one of the few blockbuster FPS titles to get into the trenches of the Great War – or World War I, if you prefer – and marked the start of a new era for the series, in a way.

This isn't the first time Battlefield 1 has been compared to Battlefield 2042, either – the numbers were starting to level out, even nine months ago. We just didn't expect BF1 to leapfrog its newer counterpart so drastically in such a short span of time.

You can check it out on Steam here, and read all our coverage of the now-classic title over on our Battlefield 1 hub page.