What Does Battlefield 2042 Beta’s Performance Say About Its Upcoming Launch?
This year-end is going to be more exciting than most with Activision Blizzard, Microsoft Game Studios, and Electronic Arts all putting first-person shooter games onto the market. With fans already split on what they like and dislike, it is hard to predict how each game will be received on launch day. Fortunately, we have some numbers on Battlefield 2042 to help us analyze their current reception and predict their upcoming sales.
Nothing marks the sign of a new entry in Battlefield quite like the open beta that precedes its official launch. The company has been doing this for over a decade now. Tease the game to gain interest, release trailers to build hype, and then announce a beta to stress test the game and forecast sales. This year’s installment in the franchise is no different so let’s break things apart to try and do some forecasting ourselves.
Was Battlefield’s beta a success?
The peak player count on Steam was 156,665 players with over 2 million unique players participating in the beta.
Peak viewers on Twitch were 339,393 which surpassed the all-time peak for battlefield 5 which is just 287,254.
On Twitch, 5,020 channels were streaming the game at its peak.
Players were able to easily party up and play with friends, a feature that is oftentimes elusive in Battlefield.
Level progression was saved from day to day and there were no server-wide game-breaking bugs or exploits.
Just about every metric has this game already far ahead of 2018’s Battlefield 5. Unfortunately for EA and its investor battlefield 5 has only sold 7.3 million copies largely because of the game’s low interest levels preceding launch. The beta was underwhelming and many players were not impressed by the changes the game had made over 2016’s Battlefield 1. It would appear, based on the information we currently have, that Battlefield 2042 is already starting much stronger, and if interest can continue to grow things sales could be good for EA DICE this year. Things are not perfect, however, and this beta did have many problems of its own.
Initially, servers were regularly going down, and many players could not log onto the game until several hours after the beta had started.
Rumors of cheaters being able to bypass the anti-cheat technology ended up being true, and many players reported wallhacks and aimbots.
Players on next-gen consoles saw framerate stutters as well as many graphical bugs.
New gameplay elements like on-the-fly gun customizations and a lack of class specialties had some players feeling like this game is not as similar to Battlefield 3 and 4 as EA DICE had claimed.
Naturally, players took to social media to voice their concerns and the initial reception of the game seemed very bleak for EA. However, we have had a few weeks to separate ourselves from these reactions and it seems like overall things went well. This tweet by a developer stated that
“Our Open Beta is now a few months old. We polish and enhance it to make sure that it’s representative of the game we’ve built, but naturally, we’re making daily improvements, changes, and enhancements all the time.”
More information has come out confirming this was a build from a couple of months ago and, indeed, many of the server and graphical issues have since been solved. This news as well as information that UI, movement, and character changes have been made following feedback has helped to shift overall feelings towards the game. Like most things online, it appears that initial criticisms were the loud few and as they cooled down more positive feedback was able to surface.
So, was the beta a success? Based on current feedback, player-count metrics, and internal news about fixes already being made, it would appear as if it were a success. Maybe not the perfectly polished game that some had hoped for, but a fun experience that EA has been able to learn from nonetheless. After the shortcomings of Battlefield 5, it also feels as if reception is moving in a positive direction; great news for executives at EA and DICE. The official release date is November 19th, barring any more delays, which should hopefully be enough time for EA to fix the last of their problems.
What can we infer assuming the beta was indeed a success?
A good place to start is by comparing where we are at now with the performance of the two best-selling battlefield games so far; Battlefield 3 released in 2013 and Battlefield 1 released in 2016. BF3 has sold 17 million copies and net an impressive 9 million players in its beta. BF1 has sold 25 million copies and net a record-breaking 13 million players in its beta. History shows that beta numbers are heavily correlated with total sales. Though we don’t know the exact number of total players in the beta this still puts BF2042 in a good spot with just the Steam number.
Audiences are becoming more confident that development is going smoothly which has positively increased the outlook on two new game modes coming to the game. Battlefield Portal is a unique experience of old and new that strives to capture the attention of old-school audiences that prefer the classics in the series. Battlefield Hazard Zone is a battle royal meets Escape from Tarkov game mode that aims to pull in fans of more strategic and high-risk experiences. These game modes were not available during the beta, and if EA teases out the information properly hype could continue to grow leading up to release.
The beta has helped to increase awareness about the game, give a means of bug fixing, and provide important feedback for EA. These successes combined with increasingly interested audiences are precisely what EA DICE was hoping for ahead of its release.
