The Battlefield 6 beta shoots up Steam’s most played charts even before it goes truly open

The Early Access portion of the Battlefield 6 beta kicked off earlier today across all platforms. Available today and tomorrow, this period of the beta does not require pre-ordering a copy of the game, but you do need a code to access it.

Those who signed up for Battlefield Labs when it was initially announced are guaranteed access, but there are other ways to get codes, too, such as watching Twitch streamers play the beta.

Without a code, however, you’ll have to wait until the first proper weekend of the BF6 beta goes live this Saturday, which is what makes these numbers very impressive.

Moments after the Battlefield 6 beta went live, players quickly found themselves stuck in long log-in queues, which EA said was intentional to manage the flow in moments of very high activity, such as when servers first go live.

If you guessed the beta must be very popular, you’d be correct. Over on Steam, the beta has shot to near the top of the platform’s most played games, peaking at 296,550 concurrent players (via SteamDB), enough to land it in Steam’s top five.

At the time of this writing, the game sits in the third slot, and it’s not showing signs of slowing down. Battlefield 6 has itself, of course, just landed at number two on Steam’s global best sellers list, second only to Counter-Strike 2, as the list is sorted by revenue.

These are all, without question, incredible numbers.

For one, most players in Europe and the Middle East are probably at work, meaning the figures can only grow later today. They’re likely to also explode on Staurday when the fully-open beta goes live. It’s also worth keeping in mind that Steam is not the only place to play the beta, as it’s available directly on EA’s own app, as well as the Epic Games Store.

The Battlefield 6 beta is, of course, also live on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S right alongside PC, so it’s not hard to imagine the total concurrent being somewhere close to 800,000 or 900,000 players, judging by the Steam numbers alone.

We’ll keep an eye on it, and let you know if any issues arise.