It’s quarterly report time for EA, and, in addition to boasting sales figures in the billions, the gaming mega-publisher announced that Battlefield 1 had more than 19 million players joining a game from its release to the end of March, 2017.
Of course, like Overwatch‘s recently announced 30 million players number, this doesn’t mean that there are or could be 19 million people regularly playing the game. This is just the amount of unique people who have played a game of Battlefield 1 at one time or another.
That being said, this is still a great number for a shooter of this type, especially one that released in between Titanfall 2 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. For context, EA said this is a 50 percent increase over a comparable time period in Battlefield 4.
One of the reasons people praised Battlefield 1 was because it so starkly and positively contrasted with the likes of Infinite Warfare‘s space setting. While the rest of the shooting games market zigged, Battlefield 1 zagged, going back to a time long before overwrought technology invaded shooters. This was met with praise by both critics and gamers alike.
While these numbers can be easily misinterpreted, it’s still a positive sign for the game, as well as future games that are going down a similar path, namely Call of Duty WWII. With Call of Duty returning to the boots-on-the-ground root of the series, they have Battlefield 1 as a proof of concept. Similar success in a Call of Duty game is likely to be much higher.
