The Battlefield 6 hype train continues to barrel along.
Battlefield 6 Twitch Streams Are Strong… But Is It Organic?
Insider Gaming found that Battlefield 6 beta has an 844,723 peak viewer count on Twitch. This is higher than the peak viewers of all Call of Duty games save Call of Duty: Warzone. It’s also higher than the viewer counts for Rainbow Six Siege, Overwatch, and PUBG.
But, this might not necessarily indicate how much players are interested in it. An earlier rumor claimed that EA spent ‘substantial amounts of money’ for the biggest content creators to stream Battlefield 6.
So, it is possible that these numbers are from fans of those streamers. While this campaign exposed the game to these streaming fans, those 800,000 + viewers may not all buy the game.
These Numbers Could Prove The Hype Is Real
SteamDB also proves Battlefield 6’s early success. It logs that the beta had a peak of 334,549 concurrent players on Steam since it started earlier today.
This is considerably higher than the 48,000 players who were in the Battlefield 6 beta queue. Actually, that queue number also kept getting higher before the beta became available. But this concurrent player number is a clear sign of EA’s achievement.
Those Number Could Go Up Even Higher
The official Battlefield Comms account tweeted this earlier:
We’re currently investigating an issue causing players being unable to login, start a game, or receive an error message about Early Access being unavailable. The team is working on it!
As of this writing, Steam players are down to 146,448 players. This drop can partly be explained by time zones. But it’s also possible there are players who are being blocked by technical issues.
If this issue gets fixed early, than they could get as many players as their servers can accept joining in. EA will definitely want to maximize those players over the weekend. This is the time when a lot of gamers who can’t play otherwise will be checking it out.
Does That Mean Battlefield Beats Call of Duty Now?
Activision apparently said that Call of Duty is too big to fail. They’re confident that Battlefield will not be ‘beating’ them that easily.
However, Call of Duty and Battlefield are not really going head-to-head like they used to in the old days. It’s true that most of the other big shooters aren’t as big as them. But both fall under the looming shadow of Fortnite and PUBG.
Really, Battlefield’s struggle is about more than trash talking Call of Duty now. If Battlefield 6 does put them back on track vs. their rival, Battlefield Studios’ real fight is to carve out a spot vs. the live service giants.
