Anointed by many as the true spiritual successor to Star Wars: Battlefront II, the beloved Galactic Contention mod for Squad dropped its long-awaited update yesterday, and it kicked off with a massive bang. Following months of built-up anticipation, players rushed back the moment the servers went live, rapidly filling servers.
Given how long the mod was offline, some in the community wondered if the player base would return with the same intensity. Those doubts were erased almost instantly. Not only is the existing community rallying around the new update, but a surge of new players is buying Squad strictly to get in on the Galactic Contention action.
Every available server was maxed out from launch, with queue wait times routinely stretching past 10 minutes just to grab a slot. In the Central US region alone, filtering strictly for low-latency servers under 60ms ping, 21 full lobbies were running simultaneously, and even getting into those was a battle due to how many players were stacked in queue for every available lobby.
Breaking Down the Numbers
A closer look at those regional server metrics reveals the sheer scale of the launch turnout. Out of the 21 sub-60ms lobbies available in a single region, every server was packed to near-capacity at 98 to 100 players, accounting for 2,100 active combatants in-game. On top of that, with an average of 34 players waiting in queue per server, another 714 queued players were stuck waiting on the sidelines. That brings the single-region total to roughly 2,814 total players locked into just one local server filter.
The Global Scale
According to Steam data taken at the exact time the lobby metrics were recorded, Squad had a total of 12,266 concurrent players worldwide. Doing the math, nearly 23% of the game’s entire global player base was packed into just one regional server list. When accounting for active lobbies across Eastern US, European, and Asian servers, conservative estimates indicate that anywhere from 44% to 52% of everyone playing Squad globally was playing Galactic Contention.
