Battlefield 6 is in development hell: passes $400M in budget, aiming for 100M+ players

Battlefield 6 looks to be in development trouble with a new report suggesting the game has a budget "well north" of $400 million, and super-ambitious targets of over 100 million players.

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In a lengthy article posted by Ars Technica, we've got more details about EA's next-gen Battlefield than ever before, which you can read here. The new Battlefield is codenamed Glacier, and seems to be having issues stemming from the top-down vision from leadership, which hardly ever works out.

EA's executive leadership has some lofty goals of wanting to see over 100 million players in the new Battlefield, but the franchise has never even gotten anywhere close to those numbers. One EA employee told Ars: "Obviously, Battlefield has never achieved those numbers before. It's important to understand that over about that same period, 2042 has only gotten 22 million". Even the most successful game in the franchise, Battlefield 1 from 2016, only achieved "maybe 30 million plus".

The gaming industry has changed in the years after Battlefield 1, and changed radically in the decades since Battlefield 1942 (I was there, and spent hundreds of hours playing BF1942 with my friends and family over LAN, and it was incredible at the time).

We have moved from a gaming world where you spent a chunk of money up-front with no free-to-play mode, but in that time we've had the likes of Call of Duty and Fortnite with their popular Battle Royale game modes freely available, making money from users through in-game purchases and season passes that unlocked post-launch content.

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It's been thought that if the new Battlefield did the same, it would enjoy comparable numbers to Call of Duty and Fortnite, so a free-to-play Battle Royale game mode was added as a core offering to Glacier, as well as a 6-hour single-player campaign, traditional Battlefield modes like Conquest and Rush, a new free-to-play mode called Gauntlet, and a community content mode called Portal.

This has led the new project into a world with a budget of over $400 million back in early 2023, but it has been two years since then, and the game has shifted targets since... with multiple setbacks that "significantly disrupted production" and "hundreds of additional developers" were bought on to help Glacier from various EA-owned studios to "get things back on track, significantly increasing the cost".

Ars reports that from multiple people familiar with the finances on the new Battlefield, that the current projections are now "well north of $400 million".

Battlefield 6 looks to be in trouble and unless it launches flawlessly this time, I fear it might be the last game that we'll see in the franchise for a long time. The gaming industry has moved so much around Battlefield, that those days of Battlefield 1942, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Battlefield 3, and Battlefield 4 (my favorites from the franchise) are well behind it. I truly hope not... but with what looks to be half a billion dollars (or more) in budget... EA really, really needs this to be an absolute home run that generates many billions of dollars in the years to come.