After what can only be described as a dream rollout, EA launched the open beta for Battlefield 6 this weekend for only 2 days. Right now, it's sitting at over 500,000 concurrent players with a peak of 521,079 players that it hit just an hour ago. Those are the best numbers for any Battlefield ever, and by far. It's clear the community is loving the game and every step the developers take have been intentioned with increasing the game's quality, including fragmented downloads and modest hardware requirements.
Battlefield 6's open beta currently ranks 18th in the all-time player count for Steam games. That might not sound like much, but when you consider that it's the only FPS in that list apart from Counter Strike and two Battle Royale games—PUBG and Apex Legends—suddenly, it becomes a hell of a lot more impressive. Not only that but Call of Duty ranks two tiers below at number 20, with its peak being reached almost 3 years ago with Modern Warfare 2. Move aside, old man, there's a new sherrif in town.
It's important to note that previous Battlefields did not initially launch on Steam, i.e., they had their betas on EA's proprietary platforms so it's hard to track their performance. Still, the success is undeniable. After all, the queues are so insane that players were having to wait up to half an hour just to get in at the start because some 250,000 players were in front of them. It's also a testament to how well-optimized the entire pipeline of the game seems to be, with some players claiming the beta runs better than the last two games on their final release.
So, this begs the elephant-sized question in the room: is Battlefield back? Well, the boring truth is that it's too early to tell. Many games falter from initial reveal to launch; Battlefield 2042 had over 150K players in its beta but that number dropped down to just above 100K at launch.
Of course, that game wasn't nearly as beloved and didn't come at a time where its rival was subjected to waned reputation. Everyone seems to dislike what Call of Duty has become, with the latest Black Ops 7 reveal drawing severely negative responses, so even those who may not like the FPS genre to begin with will probably flock to Battlefield 6 as a Hail Mary. Hell, even the people not playing the game are breaking records as Twitch viewership for Battlefield 6 crossed 870,000, which is more than twice as much as the previous Battlefield that topped out at around 350K.
EA will release Battlefield 6 on October 6, 2025 across PC and consoles, while the open beta is set to end tomorrow. There's no telling if there will be more betas or pre-release events (hard to believe not) so if you want to get a taste of some bootstrapped military shooter action, now is your time. There's more chance than not that you'll end up walking away with a newfound appreciation for the genre, so much so that even a former Blizzard executive had to chime in with praise.
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