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

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.

But this is still an insanely impressive showing for an open beta, and more supporting evidence that the recently rather one-sided CoD-Battlefield rivalry could be a real race this year. PCG FPS expert Morgan Park certainly thinks so on quality grounds, while former Blizzard president Mike Ybara seems to be rooting against his former team with prognostications in favor of Battlefield 6.

For a more apples to apples comparison of player counts, The Battlefield 6 beta was already the most-played game in the series on Steam on its first day of availability, when it was only playable by Battlefield Labs members. It now has five times the number of players as Battlefield 2042's peak player count set in 2023, two years after launch and buoyed by its long comeback tour.

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.