Battlefield 6 beta peaks at nearly 10,000 concurrent players on Steam before it’s even out

You know your game is highly-anticipated when people rush to download it as soon as it becomes available, but also when they’re happy to launch it well before servers are even live. That’s clearly true in the case of the Battlefield 6 beta.

The Battlefield 6 beta doesn’t go live until Thursday, and even then, you need a code to play that early portion. That hasn’t stopped players from downloading it, only to idle in the game’s menus.

The Battlefield 6 beta pre-load went live yesterday across all platforms. That includes Steam, where you can not only grab the beta files in preparation for the two beta weekends, you can also launch the game.

Sadly, there’s no way to “play” it right now, but you can access all of the game’s menus. This includes visuals, audio, graphics, controls, keybinds, HUD customisation, accessibility and pretty much the entire suite of options you’ll find when the beta goes live.

That’s what thousands of players have been doing since the pre-load became available. Over on Steam, the Battlefield 6 open beta achieved a concurrent player count of 9,463 (via SteamDB), over half of whom are currently “in-game” as of this writing.

Battlefield 6’s list of tweakable options is massive, and some sub-sections offer the sort of granular control that requires a bit of work to dial in, so you can see why savvy players launched it immediately after finishing the download. Now, while the majority of options won’t require you to be in a game to test out, many still do.

That said, it’s incredibly helpful to get access to such a massive list ahead of time, even if you’re only interested in exploring the available options. Another major reason you’d want to launch the beta before servers go live is that it’s also going to expose problems you may be able to tackle ahead of the start of the beta.

For instance, the BF6 beta requires Secure Boot to be enabled in Windows (and your BIOS). In fact, the beta will not start without it. It also will not launch for players using anything but the most recent GPU drivers. Imagine having to fiddle with that as your friends are waiting for you on Discord the day the beta goes live.

The BF6 beta’s Early Access portion begins this Thursday, before it opens up to everyone on Saturday. You can pre-load it now and join the thousands of players who’ve been idling in its menus.