Star Wars Battlefront 2 had over 2200% more Steam players this weekend than it did last June—and it's thanks in part to Kyrie Irving and his level 101 Emperor Palpatine

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This is where the fun begins. Or began. In 2017.

Kyrie Irving and Emperor Palpatine.
(Image credit: Maddie Meyer/Getty Images, EA)

We're still in the midst of an unexpected renaissance for Star Wars Battlefront 2. Last month, we wrote about the surprising upsurge of Battlefront 2 player counts on Steam, which was really only surprising for as long as it took to remember how good Battlefront 2 is. Over the last four weeks, those player counts started to tumble back downwards.

Until this last weekend, that is, when EA kicked off a 90% off sale. Overnight, Battlefront 2 player activity on Steam rocketed upwards, and by Sunday had reached a new all-time peak of 35,892 players according to SteamDB charts. That's more than triple the previous Steam peak of 10,489, and an over 2200% increase from last year's Sunday, June 23 player count of 1,540.

After spending most of the last year hovering below 2,000 concurrent players, Battlefront 2's sudden surge in attention is remarkable, particularly when you consider that it'd been rendered unplayable for an early chunk of 2025 thanks to widespread hacker shenanigans. It's probably no coincidence that its player counts started rising right as Andor season 2 started airing, which drove Andor actor Muhannad Ben Amor to share his own 469-hour playtime with the game.

That attention culminated in Battlefront 2's previous peak player record, set in May with the help of a Resurgence Day community event organized by the creators of Kyber, an extensive Battlefront 2 conversion mod.

More recently, Battlefront 2 has been enjoying some very vocal support from one noteworthy champion: Kyrie Irving of the Dallas Mavericks.

Irving, a nine-time All-Star and 2016 NBA champion, has had an impressive career in professional basketball. He is also, as he revealed in a Twitch stream on Saturday, a Battlefront 2 diehard, where he's had an equally impressive career as a level 101 Emperor Palpatine.

"I love this game," Irving said during the stream. "I want them to make Battlefront 3 already, bro!"

At this point, I feel that it's important for you to understand as a reader that, in Battlefront 2, playing as Palpatine means watching the galactic emperor scamper around maps at high speed with his little goblin hands poised in front of him in gleeful anticipation of getting to zap some guys—an image that Kyrie Irving has personally spent dozens and dozens of hours watching. I just want us all to acknowledge that.

Given Irving's occasional history with veering into antisemitic and antiscientific conspiracy theories, I'll let you decide for yourself how heavily you weigh his opinion. I'm more of a Chewbacca main, personally.

If you want to join the Battlefront 2 revival, it'll be on sale on Steam for $4 until June 26.

Lincoln Carpenter
Lincoln Carpenter
News Writer

Lincoln has been writing about games for 12 years—unless you include the essays about procedural storytelling in Dwarf Fortress he convinced his college professors to accept. Leveraging the brainworms from a youth spent in World of Warcraft to write for sites like Waypoint, Polygon, and Fanbyte, Lincoln spent three years freelancing for PC Gamer before joining on as a full-time News Writer in 2024, bringing an expertise in Caves of Qud bird diplomacy, getting sons killed in Crusader Kings, and hitting dinosaurs with hammers in Monster Hunter.

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