Battlefield 6 will be able to support more players at launch than its record-breaking Open Beta

If you're a competitive gamer who enjoys playing shooters casually or seriously, odds are you jumped into the recent record-breaking Battlefield 6 Open Beta. With the hype surrounding the game growing steadily in recent months, by the time the Open Beta rolled around, the sheer number of players trying to join the action at once led to long queues and some matchmaking issues.

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Granted, the team at Battlefield Studios (Criterion, DICE, Motive, and Ripple Effect) deserves a lot of credit for getting on top of things early and ensuring that, as the first and second weekend of the Battlefield 6 Open Beta continued, trying to get into a match wasn't a case of watching a five-digit number slowly count down.

Recently, we had the opportunity to sit down with Christian Buhl, Technical Director for Battlefield 6, to discuss the game, its upcoming launch, and the PC version. We also wanted to know, with millions of players jumping into the Open Beta, whether the game will be able to handle even more when it launches on October 10, 2025.

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Let's say there are three times as many people who buy the game digitally in the first week as expected. That's a great problem to have. But by that same token, you've got three times as many players trying to play the game. How adaptable is the network side in terms of being able to spin up new hardware, or optimise matchmaking for faster queues, or even grow or shrink based on the demand?

Christian Buhl: "We hit a higher number in the Open Beta than we were originally expecting and planning for, and we scaled up to support a higher number than we were originally planning on. So it is scalable. But, for the Open Beta, we hit a number that we were like, 'You know what? We want to kind of protect it for now.' And so we set a cap that we wouldn't exceed, and we weren't confident we could handle."

"Coming out of Open Beta, we're evaluating that success, and we are making sure that we can scale to even higher levels. We want to make sure that there are as few queues as possible. Now, just for clarity, there are two reasons we use queues. One is rate limiting when we turn the game on. If a million people try to log in all at once, we need a queue just to shuffle them in a reasonable timeframe. The second is to use a queue if we think we can't add any more players without overloading some of our systems."

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"We're probably going to have rate limiting at launch, maybe that first hour or so when the game comes on, people will experience pretty short queues. But our goal is that there won't be any queues at launch. However, we want to have a solid, stable experience for our players, so if necessary, we will cap out and make sure that players who are currently playing are having a good experience."

"We are expanding our server capabilities beyond what we had for Open Beta, and we still have to test scaling to certain levels that we haven't scaled to before, and we're doing that right now."