Rocket League: What’s behind its recent surge in popularity?

Rocket League surprised everyone on January 25, when its playerbase spiked to one million, something unheard of for the free-to-play racing game in recent years. Many had cut ties with the game, growing tired of servers being repeatedly taken down by hackers.

But that’s not all. A lack of content compared to what has been released in Fortnite in recent years, as well as a new mode called Rocket Racing, heavily inspired by Rocket League, made players turn to the battle-royale game instead. However, with this new spike, some wonder if this is the return of Rocket League in 2026. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be the case.

The one million playerbase surge happened for a simple reason: a streamer. Calling himself Jynxi, he has been seemingly running a one-man campaign playing Rocket League these last several months. His videos show him competing against someone and have racked up hundreds of thousands of views.

He has been on a daily video streak of streaming Rocket League. The aim is one a day until the Rocket League Championship Series 2026, which begins later this year. On January 25, one video marked one of these, which then resulted in more players logging onto Rocket League, culminating in the player surge we saw.

As the Boston Major side of RLCS is taking place from February 19 to February 22, many are expecting these surges to repeat and increase until then. Jynxi is planning to take part in more 1v1 exhibition matches, watch others as a streaming party, all in the name of Rocket League.

Understandably, this has caused some in the Rocket League community to wonder whether it could mean trouble for Epic Games in maintaining the game’s servers. Surges like this are usually meant to happen when big events occur, much like the Fortnite Live Events that take place at the end of each of its seasons.

With the next one set to take place around March 6 to mark Chapter 7, Season 2, a similar surge like Rocket League’s is expected to happen. So no, Epic will be fine in maintaining these surges. What it should be doing instead is taking advantage of this moment to lure players back into Rocket League.

I’ve written about this before, and almost a year on, nothing has changed. A move to Unreal Engine 5 could give the whole game a fresh coat of paint, as well as improve the lag issues on PS5 and Xbox Series S/X consoles. These two improvements alone could bring back players who left the game long ago.

Granted, it could be short notice to do these improvements, but at least Epic Games could re-release previous chargeable content for free, like the DeLorean from the Back to the Future movies. Or just free content in general, like cosmetics, so that players feel like they’ve been missing out.

Ultimately, Epic Games has a rare moment to use the player surge to introduce Rocket League to new players. We’re almost certain that more surges are coming, so the time is now for the developer to bring back Rocket League into relevance.

A one-million player surge is not something that Epic Games should ignore as a fad. It’s all credit to streamer Jynxi that a surge is happening at all. The stats show that the number of players falls to roughly 200,000 when Jynxi is not live or hasn’t published a video about Rocket League. This is when Epic should focus on something to bring back players.

The surge is allegedly its highest in player stats in recent years, perhaps since much of the world was in lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But one look at the game’s subreddit, and it’s clear that improvements can be made. From sensitive controls to being kicked out of matches, it’s high time that Epic Games takes advantage of this moment to give Rocket League the return it deserves.