The Battlefield 6 beta has broken Call of Duty's Steam player count record, surging past half a million concurrents

A very stressed soldier fellow grimaces with intense combat emotion in Battlefield 6.

(Image credit: EA)

First spotted by Battlefield Bulletin on Twitter, Battlefield 6's open beta is doing spectacularly well on Steam: Around 500,000 concurrent players at the time of writing, down from a peak of 521,079 according to SteamDB. That puts the BF6 beta at 18th place for peak concurrents in Steam history, two spots ahead of the unified Call of Duty app's peak of 491,670 players in November 2022.

Some caveats on the Call of Duty comparison: Steam concurrents never show the whole picture for multiplatform games, and even on PC, CoD's numbers are complicated by Battle.net and especially Game Pass, which assuredly blunted Black Ops 6's Steam peak last year.

You can still get in on the action this weekend, and EA will run another open beta next weekend from Thursday August 14 through Sunday August 17. EA has shared instructions on how to access the beta on its website⁠—it's another one of those Twitch stream code drop deals. Battlefield 6 will release in full on October 10, and blessedly isn't an $80 game⁠—just a $70 one. Chump change for a high roller like me. Walkin' around money.

Ted has been thinking about PC games and bothering anyone who would listen with his thoughts on them ever since he booted up his sister's copy of Neverwinter Nights on the family computer. He is obsessed with all things CRPG and CRPG-adjacent, but has also covered esports, modding, and rare game collecting. When he's not playing or writing about games, you can find Ted lifting weights on his back porch. You can follow Ted on Bluesky.

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