Titanfall 2 sees Steam resurgence, with active players up 750%

Respawn’s 2016 shooter Titanfall 2 has seen a resurgence of player activity on Steam, with concurrent users up by more than 750% compared to two weeks ago.

The huge rise in interest around the title seems to be driven by a 75% sale price, which went live on April 15. According to SteamDB, the discount saw Titanfall 2’s active player count jump 650% in two days. Shortly after, the game broke its all-time record player count at just under 17,000.

Although Titanfall 2 was released in 2016, it wasn’t added to Steam until last summer. The game’s previous all-time concurrent player record was 13,603, achieved shortly after it addition to the platform.

The boost in players will also likely have been driven by the recent announcement of the new Apex Legends season, which directly references Titanfall characters and story points. The battle royale spin-off has more than 100 million players, according to EA.

Previous Titanfall 2 discounts have resulted in far smaller increases in active players.

Partly due to a tough launch window that saw it compete directly with both Call of Duty and Battlefield, Titanfall 2 sold well but not as well as Respawn would have liked, the studio said back in 2017.

Respawn has previously said it had pushed back plans for new Titanfall games so that it could focus on supporting Apex Legends following the battle royale game’s explosive growth.

And given the continued success of Apex, EA CFO Blake Jorgensen implied in October 2019 that Respawn was unlikely to return to Titanfall 3 in the near future.

“We really want to keep the team hyper-focused on Apex because we see there’s so much opportunity there, so I can’t give you a sense of if and when [Titanfall 3] will come, but it’s still a great brand and we certainly won’t forget about it down the road,” he said.

Last summer Respawn announced a second studio in Vancouver, which it said will focus on the continued development of Apex Legends. More recently, the company said it was hiring for an original game it has in development.