The battle lines have been drawn, the tactics set – and neither side can afford a strategic mistake.
The long wait for Battlefield 6, the latest in the long-running first-person shooter series from Electronic Arts, ended on Friday when the game launched on Xbox Series X/S, PS5 and Windows PC.
It enters a market that is one of the most lucrative and demanding in all of gaming.
Battlefield 6 represents a return to the single player mode, playing as Dagger 13, an elite Marine unit facing private military corporation Pax Armata over three continents, as Nato nears collapse.
The game also features much-anticipated new multiplayer modes, across large and small maps, on foot and in vehicles, in locations including Cairo, Brooklyn and Gibraltar.
EA – fresh off a $55 billion sale to Saudi Arabia’s PIF, private equity firm Silver Lake and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners – has lofty ambitions for the title. It reportedly hopes the game will hit 100 million players, three times more than the bestseller in the series.
Its open beta in August reached more than 500,000 concurrent players, taking it to number 18 on the list of most-played titles of all time on gaming platform Steam – before the game’s release. Feedback was positive.
It should be. A total of 92,351,578 hours were played during the game’s open beta, EA said, calling it the most tested Battlefield game in history.
But the series has long lived in the shadow of Activision’s mega-popular Call of Duty series, which has established itself as the number one title in the genre.
With more than 500 million copies sold, the series holds the Guinness World Record for the best-selling first-person shooter game series, as well as the most successful video game franchise created in the US.
And publisher Activision wants to keep it that way – two days before the release, it announced a free trial of its most recent title, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, including full access to the campaign for the first time.
With Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 set to launch in November, EA cannot afford a slip with its own big release.
The new Battlefield game is expected to sell five million copies predicted in its first week, based on reports of 1.7 million pre-orders on Steam.
The previous title, Battlefield 2042, sold 4.28 million copies in week one, back in November 2021.
But the launch featured a number of problems with the game, resulting in many players demanding refunds. Its many updates and improvements mean the game is now viewed in a mostly positive light by the gaming community.
EA, sitting in the crosshairs of its rival, is on a mission to avoid those same early issues.
