Battlefield 6 Beta Among Most-Played Games On Steam During The Weekend, Second Beta Coming This Weekend

This makes the beta of Battlefield 6 the 18th biggest game by concurrent numbers ever. According to Steam data website SteamDB, it hit an all-time concurrent high of 521,079 players on Saturday August 9.  It was one of the weekend’s most-played games, only beaten out by juggernauts like Counter-Strike 2 and PUBG. On Twitter, EA announced that it was “Battlefield’s biggest Open Beta ever.” The Battlefield Comms account had a busy weekend generally as feedback and updates were made about the event, and it likely will be just as busy this week during the Open Beta’s Weekend 2. Weekend 2 officially starts on Thursday August 14 at 8 a.m. UTC/4 a.m. ET.

The weekend wasn’t frictionless for Battlefield 6. On August 8, during the Early Access portion of the beta, a member of the Spear Anti-Cheat Team shared via EA’s forums that their anti-cheat software Javelin prevented “330,000 attempts to cheat or tamper with anti-cheat controls.” Additionally, the post said players reported “44,000 instances of potential cheaters during day one and another 60,000 so far today.”  The post was made in response to feedback around cheating, an especially relevant topic to players given Battlefield 6 requires PC players to use Secure Boot, a feature on many modern PCs that EA says it used to block “against cheats that attempt to infiltrate during the Windows boot process. It also lets the Battlefield Positive Play team use its own features and related dependent security features like TPM (Trusted Platform Module, which is a dedicated security chip on a computer’s motherboard) to combat other forms of cheating and related techniques.” Despite its use, the forum statement clarifies that “on Secure Boot, I want to be clear that Secure Boot is not, and was not intended to be a silver bullet.”

The beta’s big performance makes for an interesting development in the lead up to Battlefield 6. Outside of it being an interesting time for a military shooter’s campaign to paint the USA as an underdog on the world stage (and the Battlefield team’s insistence that it’s not that deep), the game has high expectations from people other than players. A tell-all report from Ars Technica in early July shared that EA’s executive leadership was hoping the game could reach 100 million players over a set period of time. In addition to that eye-watering goal, the piece details a stressful development cycle that included significant disruptions, culture clashes between Sweden-based studio DICE and EA’s US-based leadership team, and concerns for the single-player campaign. Ultimately, what this report and the beta weekends coalesce into won’t be known until Battlefield 6 releases. There is not an official release date at the time of writing this.