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

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.