Battlefield 6‘s open beta weekend drew in over a half a million people playing at the same time, smashing the all-time concurrent player record of Call of Duty. People, we have ourselves a good-old-fashioned FPS game-off.
In these awful times, where ludicrous shareholder expectations and bigwig dividends drive publishers into wantonly firing hundreds of developers at a time, gaming rivalries feels like such an anachronism. There used to be a time when we could revel in two major franchises going head-to-head, massive companies trying to outdo the other, albeit with legions of overly-invested fans on either side spoiling it with their fervor. Now, that just sounds like a recipe for at least one well-respected development team getting wiped out.
But, if there’s any franchises that can survive an old-fashioned two-game race, it’s Call of Duty and Battlefield. In fact, most of the previous big-noise battles involved Call of Duty at some point–the very first game in 2002 was created by a bunch of Medal of Honor devs who’d walked out on EA after a contract dispute, setting up its first rivalry. But for a very long time now, CoD has walked alone, dominating the holiday season every year no matter how mediocre it might be. Not this year though.
This weekend, as recorded by SteamDB, the public beta for EA’s Battlefield 6 peaked at 521,079 concurrent players. The best Call of Duty has ever managed is 491,670. Now, those CoD numbers are hardly to be sniffed at, but it’s worth remembering this is based on the combination of both Black Ops 6 and Warzone combined, and indeed after the extremely mainstream game has been available to buy in stores, as well as being the first CoD to be included day one as part of Xbox Game Pass. Then, if you want to argue for the other side, the BF6 weekend was free and didn’t require pre-ordering the game, so might not be at all representative of how many people will show up to buy the game when it launches October 10.
Still, EA must be dancing foot to foot. The beta had over 300,000 trying to play it before it even started, and then generated headlines with both how people were playing and how others were cheating. Beating a Goliath like Call of Duty, no matter the specifics, must be giving everyone involved a lot of confidence in the new game, especially following the extremely muted response to 2021’s Battlefied 2042, even after a year of fixes and updates, with hundreds of thousands demanding their money back.
Of course, we have no idea how many people total played the beta. Concurrent player numbers are the only real measure we have, and while a very useful measure of popularity, don’t give us the whole picture. It could be that half a million people played total, all showing up at once, or that the 480,000 who played on Sunday were made up of many people who weren’t included in Saturday’s peak. Only EA could tell us, and unless they skew enormously favorably, likely won’t.
Whether these numbers will be replicated on release remains to be seen. Activision is being extremely shy about Black Ops 7‘s release date, only pinning it down to before the end of 2025. My guess is that the publisher will avoid releasing too close to the initial buzz for Battlefield 6, perhaps opting for an early November date, hoping to pick up players who’ve burned out after a month of Battlefield and are looking for their next game. That’s not going to stop anyone (including us) comparing the two games in meticulous detail, of course.
There’s a second, extended open beta weekend for Battlefield 6 this week, starting Thursday 14 through Sunday 17.
