It's no secret that EA built Star Wars: Battlefront with DLC in mind.
From Day One, the game's $50 Season Pass has held a prominent spot on the game's main menu, constantly reminding players that they'll essentially need to buy the game a second time before they can play through all of the different maps and modes. It's not necessarily uncommon in today's gaming marketplace to see a Season Pass like Battlefront's, but few publishers advertise them so brazenly.
Whether or not this aggressive DLC promotion hurt the game is hard to figure out: Battlefront has sold millions of copies since launch, but there's not much of a community of which to speak. Even Destiny, a game that's nearly two years old, still has its fair share of regular players — that level of passion seemingly doesn't exist for Battlefront.
Following its E3 2016 showcase, EA has just released the launch trailer for Battlefront's next DLC pack, simply titled Bespin. As always, the game looks fantastic, and the addition of Cloud City is great, but one has to wonder — is new downloadable content enough to keep Battlefront alive, or is the Bespin DLC too little, too late?
Before we go any further, one has to remember that the statistics website SWBstats.com is a fan-made site: while the numbers it presents appear to be accurate, there's no way to tell if they are without official word from EA or DICE. Considering that's not going to happen, we'll simply have to assume that they're correct with the understanding that there may be some discrepancies.
Using Battlefront Stats' numbers, it's easy to see that Battlefront isn't doing as well as its overall sales would suggest. Peak traffic numbers only show about 45,000 people playing total, and the average numbers are roughly half of that. At first, that may sound like a lot of people — but when you compare that with the roughly 12 million copies that are in players' hands, the numbers don't look so good.
The DLC isn't really offering players all that much in the way of new content, either: yes, Cloud City looks fantastic and Lando is cool, but was anyone really excited to play as Dengar, a third-rate bounty hunter with roughly 45 seconds of screentime to his name?
Who knows — maybe the Bespin DLC will be the spark that reignites the Battlefront community — but at this point, it doesn't seem like there's much of a community left. With games like Overwatch proving that you don't need a Season Pass model to be successful, it's hard to justify paying an extra $50 for a few extra maps and characters ... especially when there aren't that many people left to play with.
Season Pass holders will be able to play the latest Star Wars: Battlefront DLC on June 21 — everyone else will have to wait an additional two weeks.
