Battlefield 6 follows shock dev layoff round with a free trial week to claw back player interest

After becoming the best-selling game of 2025, Battlefield 6 started slowly declining and losing much of its massive player base, with many fans citing a lack of proper post-launch support that'd keep them around. That led to a shocking round of layoffs across Battlefield Studios, and it now seems that EA wants to win some players back through a free-to-play event. Battlefield 6 peaked at almost 750,000 concurrent players on Steam at launch, becoming by far the most successful game in the franchise and definitely the most successful game of 2025. It outsold most of its competition, carved out a huge chunk of the market just for itself, and established total dominance over the shooter genre—a reign that was rather short-lived. Ever since then, the game has been bleeding players, so much so that free-to-play copycats like Delta Force have three times as many people online at any given moment as EA's franchise-saving blockbuster. It now averages around 45 to 50,000 concurrents during peak hours, which isn't bad per se, but is far removed from what the game had during its initial week on the market. Of course, EA had to point the finger at someone and therefore engaged in a huge round of layoffs across Battlefield Studios, justifying this with a need to "refocus" its BF6 strategy. And now we're seeing the fruits of that labor, as the game is set to go F2P for a week between March 17 and 24. Battlefield 6 is a great game at its core. Image via EA It'll feature six modes, as well as the Nightfall variants of TDM and Domination. While this is a good thing overall, it still does not help alleviate any of the problems Battlefield 6 has and has had since the moment it dropped last October. Big maps are basically nowhere to be found, and new maps are scarcely added to the game. Even when they are, they fail to provide the player base with what it wants, i.e., huge open battlefields that truly let players breathe and engage in large-scale combat. Though the maps in BF6 are solid in general, they're way too condensed and limited in size and scope compared to what we had in titles like Battlefield 1. Just Sinai Desert alone could fit several of BF6's maps at once on its vast open territory, which goes to show how limited the levels are in EA's latest. The free-to-play event will bring over many more players and thus increase the amount of feedback EA could use to inform its subsequent decisions, but it's not like there haven't been literal millions of players all begging in unison for EA to make the maps bigger and better. Even under the announcement of this event, players are calling this a "desperate" move while reiterating for the hundredth time that we "still need more maps and big maps." On top of the map problem, there's also an existential issue that could prove fatal for the game in the long run. That would be the lack of dedicated servers. We're stuck with Portal, a band-aid feature that no one wanted, which strongly limits server-hosting capabilities and independent server operations. There's a reason old BF titles can still be played and would be available even if EA pulled the plug on them, but the same cannot be said of BF6. At the end of the day, the F2P event will probably bring some people into the game, but EA is chasing the wrong fix for the wrong problem, instead of doing what would actually cause some of those millions to come back to what is essentially a good game at heart. The post Battlefield 6 follows shock dev layoff round with a free trial week to claw back player interest appeared first on Destructoid.

Mar 13, 2026 - 04:53

Battlefield 6 follows shock dev layoff round with a free trial week to claw back player interest

After becoming the best-selling game of 2025, Battlefield 6 started slowly declining and losing much of its massive player base, with many fans citing a lack of proper post-launch support that'd keep them around. That led to a shocking round of layoffs across Battlefield Studios, and it now seems that EA wants to win some players back through a free-to-play event.

Battlefield 6 peaked at almost 750,000 concurrent players on Steam at launch, becoming by far the most successful game in the franchise and definitely the most successful game of 2025. It outsold most of its competition, carved out a huge chunk of the market just for itself, and established total dominance over the shooter genre—a reign that was rather short-lived.

Ever since then, the game has been bleeding players, so much so that free-to-play copycats like Delta Force have three times as many people online at any given moment as EA's franchise-saving blockbuster. It now averages around 45 to 50,000 concurrents during peak hours, which isn't bad per se, but is far removed from what the game had during its initial week on the market.

Of course, EA had to point the finger at someone and therefore engaged in a huge round of layoffs across Battlefield Studios, justifying this with a need to "refocus" its BF6 strategy. And now we're seeing the fruits of that labor, as the game is set to go F2P for a week between March 17 and 24.

Battlefield 6 is a great game at its core. Image via EA It'll feature six modes, as well as the Nightfall variants of TDM and Domination.

While this is a good thing overall, it still does not help alleviate any of the problems Battlefield 6 has and has had since the moment it dropped last October. Big maps are basically nowhere to be found, and new maps are scarcely added to the game. Even when they are, they fail to provide the player base with what it wants, i.e., huge open battlefields that truly let players breathe and engage in large-scale combat.

Though the maps in BF6 are solid in general, they're way too condensed and limited in size and scope compared to what we had in titles like Battlefield 1. Just Sinai Desert alone could fit several of BF6's maps at once on its vast open territory, which goes to show how limited the levels are in EA's latest.

The free-to-play event will bring over many more players and thus increase the amount of feedback EA could use to inform its subsequent decisions, but it's not like there haven't been literal millions of players all begging in unison for EA to make the maps bigger and better.

Even under the announcement of this event, players are calling this a "desperate" move while reiterating for the hundredth time that we "still need more maps and big maps."

On top of the map problem, there's also an existential issue that could prove fatal for the game in the long run. That would be the lack of dedicated servers. We're stuck with Portal, a band-aid feature that no one wanted, which strongly limits server-hosting capabilities and independent server operations. There's a reason old BF titles can still be played and would be available even if EA pulled the plug on them, but the same cannot be said of BF6.

At the end of the day, the F2P event will probably bring some people into the game, but EA is chasing the wrong fix for the wrong problem, instead of doing what would actually cause some of those millions to come back to what is essentially a good game at heart.

The post Battlefield 6 follows shock dev layoff round with a free trial week to claw back player interest appeared first on Destructoid.

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