EA has made a big splash with Battlefield 6 in its launch weekend, setting new records for the series on Steam.
Battlefield 6 is a crowd-pleasing return for EA’s shooter, after a decade of misfires, and judging by the launch numbers players are lapping it up.
The last two Battlefield games, Battlefield 2042 and Battlefield 5, were plagued with issues at launch, so despite all the positive impressions of the Battlefield 6 beta, there was a hanging concern EA would drop the ball at the final hour.
However, despite some hiccups with the EA app, Battlefield 6’s launch appears to be the smoothest in series’ history – and certainly the most popular.
Following the game’s launch on October 10, Battlefield 6 hit a peak concurrent player count of 747,440 on Steam.
According to SteamDB, this is the highest concurrent player count on the platform in series’ history, with the second highest (if you ignore the betas for Battlefield 6 and Battlefield 2042) being Battlefield 5, which hit 116,104 almost two years ago.
This figure has also exceeded the 491,670 peak player count for Call Of Duty, which encompasses Warzone and the latest entry Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6. While Call Of Duty has traditionally been more popular on consoles, and never anywhere near as big on PC, it’s still a noteworthy achievement.
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At the time of writing, Battlefield 6 is the fourth most-played game on Steam, behind regular staples Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, and PUBG: Battlegrounds.
Prior to launch, a report from Alinea Analytics claimed Battlefield 6 had sold over 1.8 million copies on Steam, through pre-orders alone, earning $100 million (£75 million) in revenue on Valve’s platform.
While there’s no concrete figures on consoles, Battlefield 6 is currently second in the list of best-selling titles on the PlayStation Store in the UK, behind EA Sports FC 26. In other words, all signs suggest it has been a massive hit.
When will Battlefield 6 battle pass launch?
While the launch for Battlefield 6 went relatively smoothly compared to past Battlefield games, there were some issues for anyone who pre-ordered directly from EA.
On Saturday, October 11, a day after launch, EA released a statement confirming there had been an ‘outage on the EA app’ which prevented some players who pre-ordered Battlefield 6 from accessing the game.
To compensate, EA has rolled out XP boosters to affected players, along with free access to the upcoming Battle Pass, which is due on October 28.
‘We know this can be frustrating so we wanted to offer an apology… with perks,’ EA wrote in a statement. ‘The fix has been rolled out. But we aren’t done.
‘Anyone on the EA app who was impacted will receive 12 Hardware and 12 Career 60-minute boosters, which should be arriving in impacted players’ in-game inbox this weekend.
‘In addition, we will also be granting impacted players full access to a seasonal Battle Pass. If impacted players purchased the Phantom Edition, we will be granting them access to Season 2’s full Battle Pass. We want to apologise again for this outage.’
It remains to be seen if Battlefield 6 can maintain this momentum in the coming months, but based on these early figures, Call Of Duty might finally have a rival again.
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