In the midst of a huge Star Wars Battlefront 2 resurgence, an ex-DICE developer that worked on the game says he and several of his other former colleagues would come back to the series if given an opportunity.
The comment came from Mats Helge Holm, a developer that first worked on 2015’s Star Wars Battlefront reboot and the 2017 sequel as a quality assurance analyst before serving as Associate Producer on the latter’s 2019 Celebration Edition (and its upgrade) that added hundreds of new cosmetics to the Battlefield-style multiplayer shooter.
When someone asked which developer said they’d come back to Battlefront on Reddit, Holm said the following: “Me, and having heard around my group of ex-colleagues, we want to get the gang back together.”
It’s a statement that only adds further fuel to the roaring comeback that Battlefront 2 is making right now, with the game regularly climbing to player counts as high as 7-9,000 and hitting a recent peak of 9,292 on Steam according to SteamDB data. That may not seem like a lot compared to the tens of thousands of concurrent players that newer titles get, but for Battlefront 2, it’s huge. For context, since breaking past 10,000 players in January 2021, the 2017 shooter has only managed to hit a player count of 5,000 one time.
And that’s just Steam. Battlefront 2 is also available on the EA App, the Epic Games Store, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PS5, and PS4, and can also be played by anyone with an EA Play subscription (included in the PC and Ultimate tier of Xbox Game Pass). Fans are undoubtedly playing on those platforms as well, though there’s no official way to track their numbers; according to the popular creator BattlefrontUpdates, a “reliable source” says the game’s total concurrent player count across all of them has risen has high as 160K+ recently, though that seems a little too good to be true.
The reason for the resurgence has largely been attributed to a series of events and releases generating significant interest in the Star Wars franchise, including this month’s May the 4th Be With You celebrations, the new themed Galactic Battle season in Fortnite, and the critically acclaimed Season 2 of the TV show Andor that’s been widely regarded as one of the best pieces of Star Wars media ever produced (seriously, it’s phenomenal).
All of that hype has led to fans flocking back to Battlefront 2 and clamoring for a sequel on social media, with the #MakeBattlefront3 and #Battlefront3 hashtags currently trending. Even Andor actor Muhannad Ben Amor (Wilmon Paak) lent his voice to the cause, commenting in an Instagram story that “Star Wars gotta give us Battlefront 3 ASAP” and that he “grew up with Battlefront 2 — been a veteran since day one. Let’s hope Battlefront 3 happens.”
The infectious excitement is likely what drew Holm to comment, though he also went on to note that getting the “original dev team will be difficult, we are spread far and wide,” and that he has “no idea” if it’s possible.
Holm also said that making something like an Andor-themed content pack for Battlefront 2 would be a lengthy six-month process if a properly sized team was available; DICE stopped making new content for the game in 2020, with most of its developers moving on to Battlefield 2042 or other projects elsewhere, so such a team doesn’t exist right now. Notably, DICE is also working on the next Battlefield alongside three other studios.
Notably, it was also reported in 2021 that a pitch for Battlefront 3 from DICE was shot down by publisher Electronic Arts (EA) because of Star Wars’ licensing costs. “It got turned down because it takes 20% more sales to make the same money”, said one anonymous dev.
With all that in mind, it seems unlikely that EA will make a third entry in its modern Battlefront series (the 2015 and 2017 games are themselves reboots of 2004 and 2005 titles of the same names by the now-defunct Pandemic Studios). Still, that isn’t stopping thousands of Star Wars fans from pushing it to do so. And you know what? May the Force be with them. Battlefront 2 is a fantastic game that does a fantastic job of making you feel like one of the many stormtroopers or battle droids from the films, and it deserves a sequel. Never tell me the odds.
Oh, and hey — the Xbox version of Battlefront 2 is just $12.09 at CDKeys right now, and the PC edition is $14.69 at CDKeys, too. Grab it while it’s cheap and ride the wave.
