To nobody’s surprise, Battlefield 6 has launched to one of the most impressive rollouts in gaming history. Just hours after release, the AAA military shooter achieved third place on Steam’s most-played games chart today, achieving a peak concurrent player count of 747,000 (so far) on Steam alone. X poster Kami claims Battlefield 6 has already broken a player count record, and is the most played “full-priced” shooter of all time (although we haven’t been able to fact-check that claim just yet).
Battlefield 6 is the 14th most-played game on Steam so far, boasting a peak concurrent player count just shy of Baldur’s Gate 3’s 875,000 all-time equivalent and Hogwarts Legacy’s 879,000. Battlefield 6’s peak concurrent player count (at time of writing) is also 220,000 players greater than the open beta’s all-time peak of 520,000+.
Again, these numbers only account for Steam. It’s easy to forget that Battlefield 6 is also available through the EA app and the Epic Games Store, in addition to Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5. It’s essentially guaranteed that Battlefield 6’s player numbers will exceed the millions on the PC platform alone across all three storefronts.
It’s clear that Battlefield 6 represents a return to form for the franchise, and people are loving the game through and through. Battlefield 6 is the first Battlefield title to utilize EA’s public Battlefield Labs playtesting, which allows real players to participate in the game’s development — similar to Star Citizen. We saw the fruits of this playtesting in the Battlefield 6 open beta, which was one of the most (if not the) most successful open betas of any shooter game in history, with surprisingly few bugs.
Battlefield Labs also steered Battlefield 6’s gameplay in the direction that players wanted. This includes the game’s back-to-basics military theme, the removal of specialists (as seen in Battlefield 2042), and gameplay mechanics that are largely inspired by Battlefield Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3.
Battlefield 6 has also proven to be a back-to-basics game in the PC graphics department. The game is the first AAA title in years designed to run at high frame rates at native resolution. This is backed up by the game’s modest system requirements, making it super accessible even to gamers on 5-year-old mid-range hardware. Furthermore, the developers have also not developed any ray-tracing graphics for the game; instead, they have focused all their development time on improving the game’s graphics for performance.
We are just hours into Battlefield 6’s release. If we take into account the concurrent player count patterns from the open beta, we will likely we will see concurrent player numbers higher than 747,000 by the weekend.