Why Battlefield 6 Is Getting Rave Reviews And Is A Huge Hit On Steam

Battlefield 6 has made an explosive entrance onto the gaming scene, quickly becoming EA's most-played title on Steam and becoming the #4 most-played game on the platform overall. Battlefield performing this well after such a long dormant period is impressive, but especially when one considers how even Free To Play titles like EA's own Apex Legends have already been beaten in terms of All-Time Peak players. Apex, which is at #8 on Steam's Most Played currently with 116K players, has an all-time peak of 624,473—meanwhile Battlefield 6 has already reached a peak of 747,440 players, and is still maintaining a healthy 602K at its #3 spot, just over 24 hours since it launched, per SteamDB.

While only time will tell how the game performs on consoles, where Call of Duty dominates, this is still a remarkable showing on Battlefield's part and points toward a resurgence in AAA military FPS games. But how has EA and the combined forces of Battlefield Studios (including series creators DICE, Ripple Effect Studios, Criterion Games, and Motive Studios) managed to pull this off, exactly? The answer is simple: by listening to pre and post-beta fan feedback and launching a complete product that not only gives the fans what they want, but offers acceptable performance on older entry-level hardware like the NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti.


The success of BF6's launch isn't only being felt on Steam, either. In the past month alone EA's stock price went from ~$170 to ~$200, and prior to launch, preorder sales on Steam pointed toward the game making over $100 million USD, with 1.8 million pre-orders. Fan feedback cites several key factors behind this, like Battlefield 6 staying grounded in military aesthetics instead of bringing in Fortnite-esque celebrity tie-ins and wacky skins. Fans also praise guns feeling more like Battlefield 3 and a general return to the roots of the franchise, not to mention the flexibility offered for new experiences with the sandbox Portal mode. Finally, while the single-player campaign has never really been the appeal of these games, fans still praise its inclusion for the adding content versus its removal from Battlefield 2042.