Battlefield Redsec, the free-to-play battle royale mode inside of Battlefield 6, went live yesterday across all platforms, right alongside the game’s first season. This is the Battlefield series’ second attempt at a battle royale mode, after Battlefield 5’s ill-fated Firestorm.
Part of why Firestorm never really made it big was that it was locked behind the full price of the game, effectively acting as a side mode within the existing experience, and not a means to attract a new type of player, one who is not interested in buying the premium game.
Redsec corrects that much of that, but it doesn’t seem to be taking off.
Quickly after Redsec went live, Battlefield 6’s ranking on the Steam most played charts went up, reaching around 550,000 concurrent players, which is up from the usual peak of 320,000 to 400,000 the game has been settling into since launch, as seen on SteamDB.
That’s a decent boost, but you’ll notice that’s nowhere near enough to reach Battlefield 6’s launch peak concurrent of 747,440, which is a little surprising considering it doesn’t cost anything to play Redsec, whereas that player peak was made up entirely of people who bought the full game.
There’s obviously a chunk of PC players unaccounted for here – anyone who grabbed it on the Epic Games Store or through the EA app directly won’t be represented here. Indeed, there’s also a large contingent of console players across PlayStation and Xbox where Redsec may very well be doing a lot better than it seems to be doing on PC.
Twitch numbers started out strong, with Redsec (which is counted separately from Battlefield 6) reaching the top spot for a time, before it continued its natural slide down the ranks. At the time of this writing, the category has 80,000 viewers and sits in the number three spot.
These figures may very well improve over the next several days, especially once the weekend rolls around. However, considering how much hype there’s been for a Battlefield battle royale mode, it’s a little surprising to see that it seemingly hasn’t attracted the sort of attention Warzone has, or bring in as many players as the core game of Battlefield 6 managed to.
