According to a major banner on the publisher’s official website, Electronic Arts has publicly declared Battlefield 6 to be the best-seller shooter game for 2025. Such brash proclamation follows the reports that Battlefield 6, the latest title in the military franchise, surpassed the 10 million copies sold mark across all platforms since its launch. This promising sale gives the game leverage compared to its constant rival, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, which hit the market during the same period. Preliminary metrics from the UK already seem to back up EA’s contention, with Battlefield 6 racking up a far better physical retail launch than the Activision title.
The context of the above sales lead is particularly necessary due to diversifying methods of distribution in the industry. Battlefield 6 was sold entirely as a traditional full-price purchase and also through the specialized EA Play Pro subscription, while Black Ops 7 was available on day one to the vast majority of the audience through Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass, creating this media hype right at launch date. This day-and-date availability for the Call of Duty title naturally results in lower initial retail sales figures, as a significant portion of its player base accesses the game without a standard retail transaction. Thus, this current head-on collisions comparison-which flocked toward physical retail data- would not fully capture the entire scale of adoption for both titles.
Commercially, it seems to be a marked success for the game and the reboot is beginning to repair some of the blemishing marks due to the polarizing reception it received from its predecessor, Battlefield 2042. The latest entry now enjoys a “Mostly Positive” standing among players across PC platforms. The game has not been unaffected by criticism, however, to some degree. Notably, eyebrows are raised over the introduction of “unrealistic” cosmetic skins together with the continued rolling out of an extensive paid battle pass coupled with various microtransactions surrounding the game. For many in the player community, these elements appear unwelcome intrusions upon the core experience and render the title a different kind of financial imposition on one that is already priced at retail at $70.
No matter the minute differences in sales figures and internal player dissent, Battlefield 6’s market performance is undoubtedly going to be regarded as one of the major drivers in the economy for this year. The game sold much better than most contemporaneous releases at its launch, including ARC Raiders, which stands at around 4 million units sold, as per insiders. The strength and groundwork of the Battlefield brand, together with successfully pivoting back to its more traditional boots-on-the-ground-type gameplay, paved the way for the new title to grab a market share in the visibly lucrative first-person shooter reign.
