Battlefield 6 reportedly has a 100 million player albatross around its neck, and its single-player is running “massively late”
Battlefield 6’s many leaks have earned it a bit of Deadlock-style buzz, but it seems things haven’t been going well behind-the-scenes. A new report from Ars Technica based on conversations with current and former developers details a budget that’s beyond big, a campaign that’s running “massively late” following a studio closure, and an unrealistic-sounding executive goal of attracting 100 million players.
According to the report, the game codenamed Glacier is costing EA “well north” of $400 million, with that number being way more than any entry in series has previously commanded. The execs have their eyes set on competing with Call of Duty and Fortnite, so they’ve put plans in place for a single-player campaign alongside a free-to-play battle royale element, with classic multiplayer modes such as Rush and “a community content mode” dubbed Portal all chucked into the big FPS stew.
That scale has reportedly also led the suits to slap Battlefield 6 with equally huge goals: “100 million players over a set period of time that included post-launch”, according to one source. “Obviously, Battlefield has never achieved those numbers before,” an EA employee told Ars, with another adding that “over about that same period, [Battlefield] 2042 has only gotten 22 million.” Battlefield 1, believed to be the series’ peak, has apparently attracted “maybe 30 million plus” in total, shifting about 15 million copies between its October 2011 launch and June 2012.
It’ll probably not surprise you to learn, then, that “very few people” actually working on the game reportedly believe the 100 million figure is achievable, with much resting on there being “such an appetite out there for shooters of this kind that we will just naturally be able to get the audience that we need”.
The rest of the report details the game’s single-player element as running “massively late” following EA’s February 2024 closure of Ridgeline Games, something that could lead to a massive day one patch, delayed features and/or devs being pushed extra hard to fit everything in before deadline.
There’s also reportedly tension between staff at long-time Battlefield developers DICE in Sweden and the newer US-based leadership team EA drafted in for the series, and Ars have heard “several first-hand accounts of people working on Glacier who had to take stress or mental or exhaustion health leave, ranging from a couple of weeks to several months”.
All in all, it doesn’t sound like a game that’ll be fun to get over the line. We’re wishing the best to the devs on the ground working on it.
