In brief: EA has some wildly ambitious goals for Battlefield 6, forecasting player figures that most people believed were highly unrealistic. However, numbers for the just-opened beta suggest that the FPS is off to a good start: it is already the 39th most-played game of all time on Steam.
It was looking positive for Battlefield 6 and EA when almost 250,000 people were waiting in the queue for the early access beta.
Despite only being open a few hours, the beta has already reached a concurrent-player peak of 326,069, according to SteamDB. At the time of writing, the number of players is just under that figure, so it will likely be surpassed at some point.
Battlefield 6's player count means it is already the 39th most-played game ever on Steam (based on concurrent-player peaks). It currently sits just below Starfield, which had a peak of 330,723, surprisingly.
This also means that Battlefield 6's beta is the most-played Battlefield game on Steam ever – though EA only returned to Valve's platform in 2020. For comparison, Battlefield 2042's open beta, the franchise's second most-played entry on Steam, peaked at 156,655 concurrent players, while the full game managed to reach 107,376.
Prior to the beta starting, Dice posted on the Battlefield Comms X account that it was using queues to protect the player experience and ensure servers remain stable. It added that the impact was expected to be minimal, but people are obviously enduring long waits to play. As such, Dice says it is now working on a substantial increase in server capacity to reduce times in queues.
A quick note about queues and Early Access / Open Beta.
– Battlefield Comms (@BattlefieldComm) August 7, 2025
Since this is Battlefield's biggest Open Beta ever, we're putting in the work to ensure that players have the best possible experience and servers remain stable.
To support this, we will use queues to protect the player…
EA said it is aiming for 100 million players with Battlefield 6, more than three times Battlefield 1's reported peak of around 30 million players.
If you want to know more about Battlefield 6, including the full system requirements and multiplayer details, check out this article.
It's also been confirmed that the game will feature an anti-cheat system requiring players to enable Secure Boot on their Windows PCs. This effectively shuts out Linux users and those with older machines, and also explains why the game isn't compatible with the Steam Deck.