EA thinks Battlefield 6 will be as big as Fortnite as it sets 100,000,000 target

EA is allegedly spending a huge amount of money to ensure Battlefield 6 is as popular, if not more so, than Call Of Duty.

While EA hasn’t officially shown much of its next Battlefield game, dubbed Battlefield 6 by fans, some people have been able to try early builds of it through private test sessions.

Unsurprisingly, screenshots and videos from these sessions were shared online, against EA’s instructions, but they did generate positive buzz among fans; something the series desperately needed after the underwhelming Battlefield 2042.

The strong first impressions belie a tumultuous development, with reports suggesting that developers are worried EA is setting its expectations too high. In fact, it’s said the company hopes Battlefield 6 will attract at least 100 million players, over an undisclosed period of time.

This comes from a report by Ars Technica, which spoke with current and former EA employees about Battlefield 6’s progress, with ‘very few people’ confident that the game will meet that player target.

As one anonymous employee pointed out, previous Battlefield games have never even come close to similar numbers. Battlefield 2042 apparently only managed 22 million at most, while Battlefield 1 – said to be the best performing entry in the series – reached ‘maybe 30 million plus.’

Another employee added, ‘Nothing in the market research or our quality deliverables indicates that we would be anywhere near that [target].’

This desire for 100 million players has clearly come about from the success of Call Of Duty’s free-to-play battle royale game Call Of Duty: Warzone, which itself reached 100 million players in April 2021, just 13 months after its launch.

Exact details about Battlefield 6 are scarce, but Ars Technica reports that aside from a dedicated single-player campaign and traditional multiplayer options, it too will offer free-to-play modes, including a battle royale.

It’s unclear if this means Battlefield 6 will be sold at a premium, charging you for the typical single-player and multiplayer modes but including free access to other online modes, or if the free-to-play options will be a separate game like Warzone.

Regardless, EA seems to be conveniently overlooking a couple of key factors about Call Of Duty’s player count. Firstly, Warzone launched during the coronavirus-induced lockdown period, meaning many people were stuck indoors and turned to gaming as a new pastime.

Secondly, a lot of those new players didn’t stick around even after lockdown ended. We don’t have exact numbers for Warzone specifically, but a report in May said that, following the launch of Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 last November, there were 33.7 million Call Of Duty players in total; a number that has only dwindled since.

It’s a similar story with Fortnite, the battle royale ‘forever’ game that everyone else is so desperate to emulate. It did successfully attract over 100 million players when it first became popular in 2017 but it wouldn’t achieve such figures again until late 2023, thanks to the nostalgia riddled Fortnite OG season.

EA’s expectations for Battlefield 6 also mean its budget has apparently ballooned to more than $400 million (about £293 million), which is not only higher than initially planned but makes the game the most expensive entry in the series.

Combined with heavy workloads and a complicated development cycle, exacerbated by there being four studios – DICE, Motive, Criterion Games, and Ripple Effect – spread across different time zones, it’s no wonder that employees have spoken about becoming exhausted and needing to take weeks, if not months, off work to recover.

Even if Battlefield 6 winds up being successful enough to give Call Of Duty a run for its money, EA could dismiss it as a failure if it doesn’t reach those lofty goals, which in turn would lead to a lot of heads rolling across the studios.

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