Battlefield 6 officially arrived on Friday across PC and current-gen platforms. The highly-anticipated launch had some question marks hanging over it, but those quickly dissipated as soon as servers went live.
For one, this is easily the biggest launch for a Battlefield game – at least on Steam, which may well be the game’s biggest single platform. But things are even more interesting than they appear.
The Battlefield 6 beta already broke series records on Steam, having been incredibly successful and very well-received. That August energy carried over to launch, with the full version now officially surpassing even that.
On Friday, just as EA started letting players in (assuming you didn’t have too long of a queue) the game quickly shot up Steam’s most played charts. According to SteamDB, its peak concurrent player count was a whopping 747,440, which is a lot more than the beta’s 521,079 peak concurrent.
Though the peak concurrents have expectedly dropped since then, the game remains in the top five most played games on Steam as of this writing, with over 227,000 players currently in-game. A lot of that, of course, is fueled by Battlefield 6’s excellent sales performance on Steam, where it currently occupies the number one spot, having spent ten weeks in the top 100.
Although the launch was incredibly smooth by Battlefield standards – there’ve been no major apologies by EA leadership, for instance, it did have some problems. On Steam, some players ran into a ‘Game Not Released’ error message when attempting to download the game. EA offered a workaround that involved removing certain packages from the download, which seems to have taken care of the issue.
The biggest fumble, however, ironically happened on EA’s own app, where some of the players who pre-ordered Battlefield 6 couldn’t access the game at all. That was due to an outage, apparently, which EA has since fixed.
The company’s response, however, is what garnered some praise. The publisher is gifting all affected players 12 60-minute player XP tokens, and another 12 for hardware (weapons, vehicles) XP. EA is also giving those players one season’s battle pass for free.
That could be the first season’s battle pass if the affected player owns the standard edition of the game, or the season two pass if they own the Phantom Edition instead – which already includes a battle pass token.
And, something that’s becoming less and less common for major launches on Steam, Battlefield 6’s Steam user reviews are actually positive. The game’s current overall rating is Very Positive, based on over 29,563 user reviews.
82% of reviews in English have been positive, which is a far cry from the likes of Borderlands 4, for instance, which has been sitting at a Mixed rating since launch, with far more negative reviews.
EA has yet to release an official statement on the game’s launch to offer any hard numbers, which is likely being prepared as we speak. If you’re among the millions who jumped in over the weekend, make sure you’re not leaving these crucial Battlefield 6 settings at their default values. If you’re looking for a bit of light reading, our Battlefield 6 gameplay tips offer a wealth of information.
