Coming back from the Holidays, it’s so nice to see ARC Raiders doing so well. Topping Steam charts for the final week, reportedly crossing 12 million sales this past weekend – heck, even the news that many studios have approached Embark about film and TV adaptations is great. Sure, it’s not perfect, but having a multiplayer shooter, especially in the extraction shooter genre, offering a fun experience for so many months is nice.
But wait, what about that other big multiplayer shooter that launched weeks prior? The long-awaited sequel, the triple-A offering retailing for a whopping $70, and which sold over seven million copies in just three days? What about Battlefield 6?
Surely, it’s performing just as well and…it has a “Mixed” rating on Steam. Granted, it was trending in that direction for some time now, but the recent reviews currently sit at 53 percent approval. While there’s no way to tell how console players feel, at least the PC numbers aren’t doing too…aaanndd it dropped below 100,000 peak concurrent players. The crazy part? When I last saw it, the 24-hour peak was at 94,088. At this time? It somehow fell even lower, currently sitting at 90,816 concurrent players on Steam.
This isn’t a first, as such – it has dropped even lower during holidays, and the numbers were definitely higher in between. Seeing the concurrent player counts dropping so low in 2026 is not how you want to kick things off for the new year.
If all that wasn’t bad enough, as of December 31st, 2025, Battlefield 6 retained only 16 percent of its lifetime peak concurrent player count. Meanwhile, ARC Raiders managed to hang on to roughly 90 percent. And that’s keeping in mind the fact that the former’s lifetime peak is over 265,000 players more than the latter. It’s somehow dropped even lower than Battlefield 2042’s lifetime peak, which feels self-fulfilling in a way.
Now let’s list the obvious caveats. This isn’t necessarily the same picture on consoles – in fact, Circana’s active user charts in the United States ranked Battlefield 6 in ninth for PlayStation and eighth for Xbox for the week ending December 27th. Furthermore, those PC numbers don’t reflect the number of people playing through the EA App. Don’t laugh! There are probably dozens of them. Dozens!
Also, when examining weekly active players on Steam in the United States and Canada, Circana found that it ranked third, just behind Counter-Strike 2 and ARC Raiders. In Mexico, it was in fourth, just behind Marvel Rivals (for some reason). So for all intents and purposes, Battlefield 6 isn’t “dying.”
However, there’s no denying that plenty is going wrong, and the mood is far from optimistic compared to its launch month. Fans have lambasted the Battle Pass with its grindiness and annoying mechanics, including the need to complete weekly challenges to progress, which in turn means playing modes that they wouldn’t ordinarily want to. In fact, it was a major consternation when RedSec released, since those who didn’t care for battle royale were forced to play it to make any meaningful progress.
Players might have begrudgingly endured the monetization and high skin prices if Battlefield 6 had been free-to-play (or if there were halfway decent-looking options), but it’s $70. And that’s on top of having a lackluster campaign (with no co-op), constant ads to buy the battle pass, and smaller time-limited event Battle Passes that also demand your money. In the name of everything pure, do not even get me started on Battlefield Pro.
All of this is obviously annoying enough, but then the core multiplayer experience – which already faced criticism for its small Conquest map sizes and even smaller new modes – began to suffer. Hit registration issues, sound issues, matchmaking issues. Defibrillators broken? The main menu UI no longer works after playing a match.
The fact that Battlefield Studios released not one but two all-time awful maps as part of Season 1, back to back, is kind of impressive. Probably not as impressive as the AI-generated player card in that one cosmetic pack – which feels more like the team trying to experiment and get away with it before adding more – but still, facetious credit where it’s due. This, after Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 faced heavy criticism for its excessive use of generative AI.
What makes this downturn for Battlefield 6 so much less surprising is that this isn’t a sudden drop. In fact, it reminds me of when I discussed why millions of players were so enamored, despite many flaws and shortcomings, at launch. For the first time in a long time, it felt like the development team was actually listening and acting accordingly, addressing their concerns and keeping an open line of communication.
Unfortunately, you also need to back that up with consistent action, and thus far, many of the major updates have consistently made the game worse. I’m not even talking about balance changes, though some of those Breakthrough adjustments are truly baffling (more vehicles for the attacking side? Really?). I’m talking about all the unresolved bugs and how each patch seemingly breaks more than it fixes. This is probably the biggest aspect that separates Battlefield 6 from ARC Raiders – that’s on top of listening to players, the latter delivers updates that are mostly well-received by the community (don’t get me wrong – there are more than enough complaints to go around).
At the end of the day, Battlefield 6 isn’t so much dying as trying its players’ patience. After all, the core gameplay, from the movement and guns to the atmosphere and objective-focused modes, still feels fun. This is probably the most fun the series has been in years, so to see it going through death by a thousand cuts, either in the name of greed or due to technical issues, is disappointing for any fan.
On the bright side, it’s probably a good thing that Battlefield Studios is undergoing this trial by fire now rather than later. If it can take time, adequately address concerns and tackle the core issues, then it will only pay off in the long run. Look at Battlefield 4, which launched in an absolutely broken state, multiplayer-wise. Instead of burying its head in the sand, DICE put in the work alongside the community and completely transformed it.
The fact that Battlefield 6 has redeeming factors also puts it above Battlefield 2042, which felt dead in the water from day one. The developers may never nail the perfect weapon balance; at the very least, they can deliver what the community wants the most, from larger maps, enjoyable versions of Rush and Breakthrough and naval combat to persistent servers and more generous battle pass progression. Some cosmetics that players actually want to pay for and take the time out to unlock wouldn’t be so bad either.
Since EA wants to continue riding this gravy train for all its worth, I doubt it’ll let DICE take a “don’t care, got your money” approach. The question is how much time it needs to truly cater to the community before they move on to something else. If there was a time for action and reminding fans why they love the franchise so much, now would certainly be it.
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.
