Battlefield 6 is proving to be an already huge hit with gamers. According to what I have seen, the game has some 1.7 million preorders. It is predicted to sell 5 million copies in its opening days.
This game is already a great success for EA and the studios worked on the game. However, how much more can it sell?
In my opinion, the Battlefield franchise has always been a big money maker for EA. There hasn’t really been a time when the games were obscure. Any dark horse games such as Battlefield Vietnam or Battlefield Hardline were still successes in the sense of having enough players to justify continuing the series. Some of this I can place to the general popularity of team-based FPS games. A single player FPS game such as Metal Eden, is rare now and multiplayer games often rely more on the player base to create their own stories not the people making the game.
Battlefield 6 is a hybrid game. It has a single player campaign, focusing on the battle between NATO and Pax Armata. However, this isn’t the main focus of the game.
The series for many years did not single player campaigns. Such campaigns are now becoming standard in the series. This gives EA more avenues to monetize the game and also move the series towards the cinematic style which really began with Battlefield Bad Company and then really started going with Battlefield 3.
The previous Battlefield games before Bad Company were more about sandbox gameplay with exception of Battlefield 2142. It is with that game that Battlefield began moving away from Sandbox with Conquest to a cinematic style with Titan Mode. The Titan Mode, the first truly objective oriented game style in Battlefield, moved Battlefield away from taking territory to a narrative about attacking huge floating ships in the skies. Such an objective mode was actually hinting at some order being put into those games.
Battlefield 6 shows the maturity of the franchise especially in comparison with Call of Duty which seems to be moving away from realism towards more abstractions. The newest game, Black Ops 7, is leading heavily into simulation in a futuristic setting here. Battlefield 6 is going back into modern warfare and players seem to be responding quite positively here. What this shows that Battlefield 6 will probably be better received than Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 this year.
I believe Battlefield 6 will probably sell more than what analysts are predicting. Once the game is released, people are going to remember why they love playing video games. Enjoyment is the goal of all video games, monetization comes later and that is what Battlefield 6 is showing here.