Battlefield 2042 drops below 1,000 players on Steam, as indie game snaps up users

Battlefield 2042 has dropped below 1,000 active concurrent players on Steam, marking a new low for the multiplayer FPS's playerbase.

On April 11, only 979 people were playing Battlefield 2042 on Steam, according to data recorded on SteamCharts and spotted by users on ResetEra (thanks, Eurogamer ).

Dice’s multiplayer FPS has been hemorrhaging players for months, as persistent glitches and content rollbacks continue to disappoint fans. Many are now looking for alternative games to fill their multiplayer FPS craving and have flocked to the little-known, upcoming indie game Battlebit Remastered.

Battlebit is as close to a Battlefield clone as you can get – if a little blockier. It transfers the series’ core, squad-based shooting loop into a world of low-poly visuals. It’s essentially Battlefield in the skin of Roblox – and players seem to love it.

The indie game hasn’t even launched yet but managed to attract 30,000 players to its latest public playtest held from April 8 to April 10 (that’s according to the devs , although SteamDB estimates a lower, but still impressive, figure of 27,000). The playtest even ended early after servers became unstable when the number of concurrent players skyrocketed.

Battlefield 2042, meanwhile, is only able to attract a fraction of that player count. On PC, it drew a peak of 2,000 active players during the same period and hasn’t been able to reach 30,000 players since last December.

Its fall below 1,000 players marks a significant low point for the game, which is only worsened by the surprisingly high number of players that tiny indie game Battlebit has been able to attract.

A Battlefield contender

It’s easy to see why Battlebit would be such a draw for players who are disappointed with Battlefield 2042. Even in its current beta state, it includes all the hallmarks of the series: massive multiplayer matches that pit up to 250 players against each other; land, air, and sea vehicles to control; and fully destructible environments that let you topple huge buildings.

The game gives you five classes to play – Assault, Medic, Engineer, Support, or Recon (a selection that’s been directly ripped from past Battlefield games) – which all come with particular gadgets and class-specific abilities. That’s particularly enticing for those who weren’t taken by BF 2042’s specialists system.

It also places a huge focus on squad communication, encouraging you to talk with your teammates over voice chat to coordinate assaults. Voice chat is also something that’s yet to be added to BF 2042.

Throw in the option to customize your weapons with specific scopes, magazines, and camouflages, as well as make tweaks to your individual soldier, and you’ve got a game that is as close to a mainline Battlefield entry as you could hope for.

In light of the persistent glitches that continue to plague Battlefield 2042, as well as the slow rollout of content , it’s not surprising that players are now holding out for a small indie game to deliver the kind of multiplayer experience they want.

As players on Reddit suggest, Battlebit is ticking all the right boxes, and its player count keeps growing with each playtest – a January playtest attracted 7,000 players, a February build drew 17,000, and the latest has added another 10,000 on top.

They might be waiting a while, though. Battlebit is due to release in early access sometime this year, but developer MrOkiDoki’s Studio hasn’t announced a specific date. Although you can play the current playtests for free, BattleBit’s developer says the game will launch in early access for $15.

Google Photos makes it easier to pull text from your snaps

Google Photos has long had powerful built-in search powers, but now they're being pushed to front of its UI in a useful new update for Android and iOS users.

The interface change, spotted by Android Police , builds on the existing 'copy text' pop-up menu that you'll see when you view images containing text. Alongside that option, you'll also see new shortcuts that include 'Listen', 'Crop' and 'Markup'.

These changes aren't currently available to everyone, as they're being tested before being rolled out more widely. But if you want to have a chance at test-driving them, it's worth updating the Android or iOS app and checking to see if the new UI has become available.

The update doesn't introduce any new features to the Google Photos app, but it does make existing ones far more accessible and available with one tap. The 'Listen' shortcut is particularly useful for images that contain lots of text, for example getting your phone to read out museum exhibit labels.

These options also sit alongside existing Google Lens powers, including 'translate', 'search' and the handy 'copy to computer', which lets you paste any text in your photos onto a nearby laptop or desktop (as long as you're signed into the Chrome browser).

The latest versions of Google Photos for both Android and iOS were released on March 17, so if it's been a while since you updated the app, then now is a good time to grab the latest build. That's particularly the case if you own a Google Pixel 6 phone, as the update also contains bug fixes the app's tendency to crash on those handsets.

Analysis: A search engine for your snaps

Google clearly doesn't want Google Photos to just be a cloud-based library for your snaps – it wants to make it fully searchable, too, and these new shortcuts are part of a growing integration of Google Lens within the popular photo service.

This time last year, Google brought extra Lens tools, like the ability to translate text in your photos or copy it to another app, into the Google Photos app. Previously, you had to use the separate Lens app (or on iOS, the Google app) to access these features, but it looks like that round trip will become increasingly rare.

Google Lens is a powerful feature with lots of useful tricks , but its existence as a separate app has previously limited its mainstream appeal. Building its tricks into wider apps like Google Photos, then, makes a lot of sense, even if it might make some users feel conflicted about privacy.

By default, your Google Lens data and activity are saved to your Google account, but it is possible to turn this off. As Google describes in its support page , you can find and delete Google Lens activity by going to the Lens page on 'My Activity' section of your Google account.

To stop Google Lens data from being saved at all, you can also turn off 'Web & App Activity' in the ' Activity controls ' section of your Google account. That could give you peace of mind if you fancy using these powerful search features without building up a history of Lens searches pulled from your snaps.

Intel Core i9-12900K vs AMD Ryzen 9 5900X

Ever since the first AMD Ryzen processors hit the market all the way back in 2017, Intel has kind of been on the defensive. It was stuck on a 14nm process for so long, and while it was able to keep up in single-core performance, it quickly lost the lead in multi-core performance - something that is getting more important every single year.

However, with its 12th-generation Alder Lake processors, led by the Intel Core i9-12900K , Intel finally gained a fighting chance against the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X - a processor that was untouchable when it came out in late 2020.

And because both processors are trying to do pretty much the same thing, albeit in very different ways, we thought it was about time to take a closer look at these two processors. After all, picking out the best processor isn't just about the numbers on the box or the color theme of the brand.

Intel Core i9-12900K vs AMD Ryzen 9 5900X: price

There's no way of getting around the fact that both the Intel Core i9-12900K and the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X are expensive processors. Looking to build or buy a system with either of these chips likely means you're going for a high-end device. So, it shouldn't be too surprising that they have high price tags.

The Intel Core i9-12900K is the most recently released one, and it is still at full price pretty much everywhere. You'll find this 16-core processor at around $612 / £559 / AU$949. This is a bit higher than Intel's recommended price of $589-$599, but not by much. We imagine that prices will start to go down as the processor ages, and you should be able to find good deals on it soon.

The AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, however, has been out for about a year and a half, and as such is starting to see lower prices. You can find it starting at $499 / £409 / AU$739, which is much more affordable than the Intel Core i9 at the moment. It does have fewer cores, though. But if you want an AMD 16-core chip, you could fork over around $599 / £548 / AU$919 for the Ryzen 9 5950X, instead.

Intel Core i9-12900K vs AMD Ryzen 9 5900X: specs

Both the Intel Core i9-12900K and the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X are high-end CPUs, but they're quite different from one another.

The AMD Ryzen 9 5900X will look pretty familiar to anyone with passing knowledge of desktop PC CPUs. It's a 12-core, 24-thread processor with a max boost of 4.8GHz. It also comes with a whopping 70MB of Cache, split between L2 and L3, and a TDP (thermal design power) of 105W.

The Intel Core i9-12900K is a 16-core processor, but the way those cores are laid out is quite a bit different than the AMD chip. Unlike the Ryzen processor - and Intel's previous CPUs, no less - the 12900K is using a hybrid chip design. Specifically, it follows the big.LITTLE design philosophy popularized by Arm.

Basically, it has 8 Performance cores and 8 Efficient cores. The Performance cores are dual-threaded, just like the Ryzen Threads, but the Efficient cores are not. So, while this chip has more cores altogether, it has the same amount of threads, 24, as the Ryzen 9 5900X.

Both Intel and Apple have moved to a hybrid chip design like this, and AMD is the only CPU manufacturer that is still using a monolithic chip layout. We're not sure how much longer AMD will stick with this design philosophy, but it seems to be working for the company for now.

Intel Core i9-12900K vs AMD Ryzen 9 5900X: performance

While AMD and Intel have been trading blows for the last few years, the release of the Intel Core i9-12900K sees Team Blue pulling ahead again - but this time the difference is pretty significant.

In our review, we found that the Intel Core i9-12900K is about 21% faster than the Ryzen 9 5900X in single core workloads, particularly Cinebench. It's odd, because Cinebench has been the workload that has seen the most success on AMD processors, but Intel really pulled away this time.

And it's not just single-core. In the Cinebench multi-core test, Intel is 23% faster, ending AMD's reign as the multi-threaded champ. This is repeated in pretty much every benchmark we ran in our review, with the 5900X not gaining a lead in any of our creative workloads.

The closest it got was in Blender where the Ryzen 9 5900X was just 10% slower than the Core i9-12900K. But even then, that's still a pretty major loss.

In gaming, Intel is still winning, especially in the CPU-intensive Total War: Three Kingdoms. We ran the game on low settings, to make sure it was leaning as much on the CPU as possible, and the Core i9-12900K got 480 fps to the Ryzen 9 5900X's 380 fps.

However the tables turned in Metro: Exodus where the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X beat Intel with 251 fps to Team Blue's 246 fps. That's a small victory, but it's still a victory.

Either way you slice it, the Intel Core i9-12900K is faster than the Ryzen 9 5900X. Whether that makes up for the price difference is up to you, though. However, Intel's support of DDR5, PCIe 5.0 and Thunderbolt may make up the difference to you.