2016’s Titanfall 2 is turning out to be a slow burn when it comes to attracting fans. Receiving huge critical acclaim when it released, the game faced stiff competition from that year’s Battlefield and Call of Duty titles and underperformed when it came to sales. Developers Respawn Entertainment went on to great success with free-to-play battle royale Apex Legends, a game set in the same universe as the Titanfall campaigns. The developer has continued to drop connections to the older games in new updates, including a new character with lineage directly to one of Titanfall 2‘s bosses. This inspired a community-run event to revive the game on PC that the developers decided to support with a free weekend on Steam.
We heard people want to play Titanfall 2 this weekend? So do we!
Join us on Steam when we make TF2 temporarily free-to-play starting RIGHT NOW through May 3rd @ 10am PT.
Get it here: https://t.co/rn4rUSF0RG
Your journey begins here, Pilots. pic.twitter.com/SQ9eAIAWka
— Respawn (@Respawn) April 30, 2021
The result of that team-up between players and programmers is a tremendous weekend for Titanfall 2. The game smashed its previous player count records on Steam, breaching just over 27,000 players on Saturday according to Steam Charts. This is by far the most success the game has ever had on PC, both in its year on the Steam platform and in previous years on Origin before Electronic Arts ported their games over to Valve’s service.
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The game is also available via EA Play, the PC and console subscription service that gets players access to everything from Madden NFL to Mass Effect for one monthly fee. While some players already had access to the game from this service, the combination of a Titanfall-inspired hero coming to Apex Legends and this community-run weekend player drive inspired many of them to return to the game.
While player counts are returning to their normal parameters now that the free weekend is over, this surge of interest will only help behind the scenes when it comes to the prospect of a proper follow-up to Titanfall 2. While Apex Legends has raked in the cash and Respawn has proven themselves as more than capable to expand with Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, a generational upgrade for the mech shooter is still a big want from a lot of fans. As proven by the 27,000 folks who raided EA’s servers this week, there’s nothing quite like Titanfall on the market.
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