With Battlefield 6 having wrapped up both of its open betas, EA, along with developers Criterion, Ripple Effect, DICE and Motive are now working towards wrapping up development on the upcoming shooter for its October 10 release on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. One analyst – Rhys Elliot of Alinea Analytics – believes that the success of the betas have driven incredible pre-order numbers for the title.
In an interview with Eurogamer, Elliot said that the PC version of the game available through Steam is by itself believed to be sitting at around 800,000 pre-orders. This, according to Elliot, has placed Battlefield 6 as representative of “a welcome turnaround for the franchise”, since the pre-order figures are “far above previous installments and other shooters.”
Generally speaking, Elliot believes that pre-orders for Battlefield 6 will pass a million across platforms, since there are still two months until the game is actually out. It ultimately comes down to whether or not EA can capitalise on the momentum seen by the success of the open beta tests it held, especially when it comes to competing with other games coming out around the same time.
“So it depends on whether EA can continue that marketing momentum heading into September,” said Elliot. “There’s a lot going on in September on the shooter front, you’ve got Borderlands 4 coming out, a lot of other games… It’s quite quiet now in terms of releases, so there’s a lot of room for Battlefield to breathe. As we head into the Autumn period there’ll be a lot more going on, but as of right now it’s on track to do extremely well: the best Battlefield has ever done.”
Battlefield 6 saw success with even its first open beta, the positive reception of which even caused EA’s share price to rise. Last week, the success of the first beta had driven EA’s share prices to go up by around 4.7 percent, bringing it up to $176.11 per share. This also had the added effect of raising EA’s market capitalisation up to $41.94 billion. This rise in share price was attributed to a host of things, including the servers being stable and player reception being positive.
“This weekend’s beta test for Battlefield 6 was a success for EA,” said Jeffries analyst James Heaney. “Importantly the server performance was stable, and the player reception screened positive.”
The open betas were also a chance for EA to test out the Javelin Anticheat system for Battlefield 6. The company had confirmed that, during the first open beta, it had managed to prevent 330,000 attempts at cheating and tampering. The company also provided more details about the use of Secure Boot for the PC version of the game.
“On Secure Boot, I want to be clear that Secure Boot is not, and was not intended to be a silver bullet,” reads the post. “Secure Boot is how you’re helping us build up our arsenal. It’s another barrier that helps us make it harder for cheat developers to create cheat programs, and makes it easier for us to detect it when they do.”
For more details about Battlefield 6 and its recent open betas, check out our thoughts.
