Battlefield 6 open beta is already Steam's most popular Battlefield game with a peak of 330,000+ concurrent players, doubling the record of the 2042 beta and tripling 2042 itself in just hours
If the thousands of people sitting in the menu of Battlefield 6's open beta before it even became playable didn't give it away, the upcoming FPS is looking rather popular. So popular, in fact, that now that the beta's doors have finally opened, it already has the highest concurrent player peak out of any other game in the series on Steam.
As spotted by PC Gamer, at the time of writing, Battlefield 6's open beta has a concurrent player peak of 334,549 according to SteamDB. I say "open," but currently, the beta is actually in early access, and although you can watch Battlefield 6 streamers on Twitch to get access to the Battlefield 6 beta yourself (assuming you hadn't met the previous requirements), I still imagine that slight complication could mean the number might surge further when things become open to everyone on August 9.
To put it into perspective, the Battlefield 6 beta has already more than doubled the Steam peak for Battlefield 2042's beta – which saw 156,665 concurrent players at the time – and more than tripled the concurrent player peak of 2042's full release, which capped at 107,376. Its current peak also places it at number 38 on SteamDB's overall "most played games" chart, surpassing the likes of Elden Ring: Nightreign, Starfield, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and more.
The Battlefield 6 open beta is head and shoulders above every other Battlefield game on Steam, too, although as PC Gamer points out, 2042 is the only modern Battlefield game to release on Steam on its actual launch date.
Others, like Battlefield 5 and 4, returned to the storefront in 2020, years after their respective releases. As such, it's slightly unfair to compare them as closely, but that's not to downplay the beta reception we're looking at right now. Who knows how much those numbers are going to grow in the coming days?
Battlefield 6 multiplayer is faster than ever, and while I'm having fun being a speedy soldier, it's playing against the shooter's most iconic feature.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Digital Trends
an hour ago
- Digital Trends
I suck at battlefield 6 but I haven't had this much fun with the franchise since Bad Company 2
Gripping my LMG for dear life, I dodged incoming fire as my squad rushed the objective. Smoke and debris filled the air and gunshots echoed off the canyon walls. I could barely see my own teammates a few feet ahead of me in all the chaos, let alone the enemy soldiers laying down fire on us. A second squad was picked off in the advance and the zone was too hot for me to stop and revive them. I slide into what I hope is cover on the slope to a sniper's nest and lay down my resupply bag. I had no idea if it would do any good, but I felt I needed to do something. From there, I darted around the chokepoint, sliding between barricades, sandbags, and rocks for cover, using my defibrillator to keep my team and our reinforcements in the game. I catch glimpses of the enemy multiple times, and even lay down some fire, but it is all I can do to land a few shots among the chaos. Recommended Videos When I'm eventually shot down with no earthly idea where my attacker was, I accept my fate and hope I did something to help my team. Only to suddenly see myself getting dragged out of the killzone as a friendly tank rolls ahead and draws all the incoming fire. I'm saved, falling back to heal before I get back into the fray to keep my team alive. Chaos and earthquakes I lost that match of the Battlefield 6 beta. But we held that point, and that's the story I'm going to tell. The last time I had stories like that in a multiplayer shooter that I can recall was Battlefield: Bad Company 2 on the Xbox 360. I was able to spend hundreds of hours in that game thanks to how it lent itself to so many emergent moments in gameplay. The combination of destruction, large-scale battles, and complementary classes hooked me in a way few games ever had. Oh, and I was good. Now, however, things have changed. It's been over a decade since Bad Company 2 and I've lost that sharp eye I once had. I can still aim decently, but I find myself having a much more difficult time spotting enemies in modern games. I could chalk it up to the better graphics making characters stand out less, my eyes just not being what they once were, or both. Either way, I knew I was going to struggle to pull my weight starting the Battlefield 6 beta. Except that wasn't the case. Yes, I was still outgunned in 90% of firefights, but that didn't mean I wasn't contributing. In fact, I was arguably more effective when I didn't shoot my gun. That's something that has always been a part of the Battlefield experience, but has been eroded over time. With Battlefield 6, not only can I make a meaningful impact on the game in ways that didn't involve killing, but it was just as engaging. For all of you who can land crazy flick shots and can lock on to enemy heads when only a single pixel is exposed, you'll be well served here as well. The times I was able to tap into my old skills for a few moments and deal some death of my own were fantastic, but I think Battlefield 6 wants you to find a balance. The giant maps, destructible environments, vehicles, and classes aren't core to the Battlefield experience just because they are required to help sell the fantasy (or nightmare) of actually participating in a warzone-like experience. They do do that, but they also contribute to a theme of collaboration. No matter what you're trying to do, whether it be attacking a point on foot or blasting through a choke point with a vehicle, nothing in Battlefield 6 can be accomplished on your own. Not only that, but you also need every single skillset available if you want to win. That's what this beta has going in spades right now — it creates stories and moments regardless of raw shooting skill. I played solo with my mic off, but teamwork just came naturally. This could've just been my good fortune, but players wanted to stick together, resupply, wait for engineers to repair vehicles, and follow pings. I think Battlefield 6 subtly conditions players to want to play more collaboratively because going off on your own just isn't fun. You might get a couple of kills, but the adrenaline you feel participating in a clash between two forces where nothing goes to plan is the real prize. Time will tell if Battlefield 6 has the legs to keep me engaged like Bad Company 2 once did, but if this beta is anything to go by, this might be the return to form I've been waiting for.
Gizmodo
2 hours ago
- Gizmodo
Amazon Offers the Galaxy Tab A9+ Tablet for Less Than Samsung's Official Website for Back-to-School
Tablets can serve a lot of purposes for a lot of people, but sometimes the best thing they can do is just get you off your phone. Sure, it's nice to enjoy the larger screen and often boosted power, but it's also nice to use it just for games or watching streaming services instead of just accidentally doomscrolling all the time. If you're looking to pick a tablet up but the price of them has been putting you off, then today's a good day for you. That's because the already affordable Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+ is currently 29% off, making it just $156 while this limited-time deal lasts. See at Amazon The Galaxy Tab A9+ has an 11-inch screen with a 1920 x 1200 resolution and a 90 Hz refresh rate. That makes it surprisingly good for gaming, as long as the games aren't too demanding from a power perspective. It has a decent brightness rating of 480 nits too, which means that you'll be able to comfortably use it no matter what kind of lighting conditions you're in. That means it's really solid when it comes to using it during a commute. It's got decent speakers along with a solid screen, which means you'll be able to enjoy whatever you're watching or listening to with a decent amount of quality. That helps a lot if you've got it just playing music while you're doing other things on the device. It has enough power that you can comfortably do that too, and it's surprisingly good at multitasking as well. It even has decent parental controls on it, just in case you're getting it for a kid. It means that you can use the Samsung Kids app to easily control what they can get up to, and help them not only stay safe while using the tablet, but also get more out of it by guiding them towards more educational content. It's durable enough that kids can use it comfortably as well, and it's light to boot. This is a genuinely great tablet for just about any kind of user, and while the $220 price tag already puts this firmly within the affordable range, being able to get it while it's down to just $156 is a chance you won't want to miss out on. So, make sure you pick this up as soon as you can to avoid having to pay full price for it. See at Amazon
WIRED
4 hours ago
- WIRED
Inside the Multimillion-Dollar Gray Market for Video Game Cheats
Aug 11, 2025 6:00 AM Gaming cheats are the bane of the video game industry—and a hot commodity. A recent study found that cheat creators are making a fortune from gamers looking to gain a quick edge. PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION: WIRED STAFF; GETTY IMAGES Software that can see opponents through walls. Aimbots that can lock onto other players automatically. Tools that can boost characters' stats to the max. The world of online game cheats is expansive—with some cheat websites advertising hacks for dozens of PC games—and it's being driven by an underground economy that's allegedly raking in millions every year. Over the last two years, a group of computer scientists has been analyzing and mapping the online cheat marketplace, observing what behaviors get people banned from games, and probing the effectiveness of anti-cheat systems created by games developers. Combined, 80 cheat websites are likely making between $12.8 million and $73.2 million annually—that's around $1.1 million to $6.1 million per month, say the academics from the University of Birmingham, in the UK. 'People can really make a lot of money from selling cheats, and companies have a lot to lose if a game is seen as full of cheaters,' says Tom Chothia, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Birmingham. Last week, along with assistant professor Marius Muench and PhD researcher Sam Collins, Chothia presented findings about the cheat economy and research on how robust anti-cheat systems are at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. Across the North American and European cheat-selling websites they analyzed, the researchers estimate that around 30,000 to 174,000 people may be buying cheats per month. The estimates, which were first published last year, are likely an undercount of the size of the whole cheat ecosystem, the researchers say, as they don't include cheats purchased from forums, websites in Asia, or the amount of people using free cheats. (The figures largely tally with a previous $100 million estimate for the overall cheats economy.) The cheating community—both those who develop and sell cheats, and those who are interested in buying and using them—sprawls across the web. As well as dedicated cheat-selling websites, there are resellers, Discord communities, forums, smaller groups that sell cheats, and widespread marketing that tries to get cheats in front of people's eyeballs. Cheats can operate by either inserting code into the game's internal processes or parsing what is happening onscreen and taking actions outside of the game's mechanics—the most sophisticated can involve external hardware. In recent years, the markets for selling cheats have become more industrialized. 'They look like really professionally done online shops,' Collins says. Some cheat websites sell cheats for one-time use, but others charge recurring subscriptions, such as every month or 90 days. Subscriptions allow people to continue using the cheats' features over time, get updates if cheats stop working, and receive support from the developers. According to the academics' analysis, where they gathered data toward the end of 2023 and focused on software cheats, the minimum price for a cheat across the 80 websites was $6.63. Meanwhile, the most expensive price was $254.28. Many are under $100 per month, depending on the subscription type. Some of the websites have their own customer service processes and accept payments from a number mainstream payment services, Collins explains. 'The staff are quite professional,' he explains. 'They're not afraid to be rude to you if they don't like you, but they try to be pretty professional.' Core to a cheat website's success is whether the cheats actually work and—crucially—how long they will work for. Sites have 'status' indicators, showing whether a cheat is currently thought to be working. It's all part of the ongoing tussle between the cheat developers and games companies, which spend money on developing anti-cheat software and trying to limit nefarious behavior in their games—sometimes including lawsuits around perceived copyright issues. 'It's a legal gray area. It's not illegal to sell cheats' in most countries, Chothia says, noting that China and South Korea are among the few countries that have made it a crime to use cheat software. Andrew Hogan, a cofounder of games threat intelligence company Intorqa, which provides data to gaming companies about the cheat ecosystem, says developers are always evolving their cheats, becoming more technical, and trying to find ways around anti-cheat systems. 'Even the best cheats will be detected,' Hogan says. 'They don't work forever and often don't even work for a week. But we see cheat developers who are updating their sheets every one and a half days.' The cheat sites can make big claims themselves. One site's public web pages say it undertakes 'consistent testing daily' to make sure its cheats are still operating, claiming that its hacks 'can be used without bans for a long time.' 'Several of our cheats have yet to be detected from the time of their release,' the website says. Another cheats website claims its hacks are 'undetectable' and that its offerings can be customized: 'Tailor the cheats to fit your specific needs and play style.' Three cheat websites contacted by WIRED did not respond to emails asking for interviews or answer questions. While cheats and anti-cheats are getting more sophisticated in most cases, Hogan says there has recently been a 'resurgence' in an older cheat method called pixelbots—but now they've been rebranded as AI-aimbots. The bots, which are an external kind of cheat, read what is happening on the screen and aim for the cheating player. Only now they've been improved by developers using computer vision. 'They're much easier and quicker for developers to create using machine learning and AI and object detection programs,' Hogan says, noting that there has been a surge of their use in recent months. Over time, the enduring popularity of cheats and the money involved has also, inevitably, brought with it the attention of cybercriminals and scammers. In recent years, thousands of government and university websites around the world have been hacked to push Roblox and Fortnite 'offers,' that are actually used to push malware and obtain personal information. Kids trying to cheat in Gorilla Tag, an ape-based chase game, have been found installing a dubious VPN that could hijack their internet traffic. The researchers do say that in their analysis of 80 cheat-selling websites they didn't find any direct evidence of scams or malware, most likely because they are trying to make money and build strong reputations. As the cheat and anti-cheat development battle has become more sophisticated, both sides have moved into the kernel, the core of a computer's operating system. Deploying kernel drivers, at the deepest level of the OS, where they have high levels of access, creates the risks of everything from system level crashes to potential privacy and security vulnerabilities—giving anyone virtually unfettered control over your PC is never a good idea. For an example of the issues that kernel access can cause, Crowdstrike's botched update last year that crashed millions of computers around the world was possible because its software had kernel access. Microsoft announced it would move antivirus products and endpoint detection and response (EDR) out of the kernel in the future. In April, Elise Murphy, head of game security at Electronic Arts, wrote in a blog post that the company's Jevelin anti-cheat system has blocked 33 million attempts at cheating since the software launched in 2022. 'The kernel is the deepest part of the operating system, and if cheats operate from there while the anti-cheat does not, they can hide everything they are doing with no chance for us to detect or prevent any of it,' Murphy wrote. According to the University of Birmingham researchers, this kernel-level access makes anti-cheat systems incredibly robust when it comes to actually defending against cyberattacks as well. 'One of our findings is that your laptop's probably never as safe as when you are playing Fortnite; anti-cheat protection will actually keep you safe from a whole range of malware, which normal antivirus will miss,' Chothia says.
