90% of Players Gone, Battlefield 6 Pushes Pass Pre-Orders

From 750,000 concurrent players on Steam at launch to roughly 50,000 daily. That's where Battlefield 6 sits seven months after what should have been a triumphant return for the franchise. And EA's latest move to re-engage that shrinking audience isn't a new map, a mea culpa, or a free content drop. It's a prompt asking you to pre-order the Season 3 battle pass before you've even seen what's in it.

As spotted by CharlieIntel on X, logging into Battlefield 6 right now greets players with a notification advertising a "Next Season Pre-Order." The standard battle pass costs 1,100 Battlefield Coins (about $9.99), while the BF Pro token runs $24.99 in real money only. Pre-ordering the standard pass gets you a green weapon skin for the L110 LMG and two tier skips. The Pro version adds a second weapon skin, XP boosts, and the usual 25 tier skips and exclusive cosmetics. There's no discount for buying early. Season 3 itself launches May 12.

I've covered a lot of monetisation schemes in live-service games, and this one isn't the most expensive or the most exploitative. But the timing makes it feel almost tone-deaf. You're asking a player base that has cratered by over 90% on PC to commit money to a battle pass full of cosmetics they haven't seen yet, for a season that hasn't started, in a game that still has unresolved complaints about netcode, soldier visibility, and mortar balance. EA's own community update acknowledges these issues are still being worked on. Reading "we're evaluating weapon behaviour and time-to-kill" in the same week as "please pre-order our premium pass" is a jarring combination.

What Season 3 Actually Brings

To EA's credit, the Season 3 community update does outline real content. Railway to Golmud, a remake of the classic Battlefield 4 map, will be the largest map in BF6 at four times the size of Mirak Valley. Mortars are getting a meaningful nerf: they'll no longer regenerate ammo when deployed, and accuracy drops at longer ranges. A ranked Battle Royale mode is coming to REDSEC for Quads players. The playlist UI is being overhauled to replace the Featured row with a Quickplay option and reduce horizontal scrolling. These are solid additions, and the mortar change in particular addresses one of the community's loudest complaints.

But none of that changes of the pre-order push. One Reddit comment summed up the mood: "They only do these things because people buy them. If people were to simply say 'there's no chance I'm paying for this', it wouldn't happen. But people have no impulse control so they continue to roll it all out and it continues to sell." The community sounds less angry than exhausted.

This is a game that received strong reviews at launch, with an 83 average on OpenCritic and 89% of critics recommending it. The foundation is there. Season 3's content roadmap suggests Battlefield Studios knows what players want from the actual game. But layering pre-order monetisation on top of a battle pass that already costs money, for a game that already costs money, while the player count is in freefall, sends a message that EA's revenue team and its community team are operating on completely different wavelengths. Battlefield 6 is available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.