The Game Awards have confirmed what I think we all knew after the respective betas for these two games. Battlefield has finally toppled Call of Duty as the best military-themed shooter on the market. Battlefield 6 is up for three nominations, with Black Ops 7 nowhere to be seen.
EA's latest and now greatest shooter is up for Best Action Game, Best Multiplayer Game, and Best Audio Design. It sold over 7 million copies in its first three days, and hit a peak of more than 747,000 concurrent users on Steam, a record for an EA franchise. Black Ops 7 peaked at just over 87,000 concurrent users at launch.
It looks like a changing of the guard moment, but it raises interesting questions. Will Battlefield decide to adopt COD's breakneck pace of annual releases? For the first time in its history, COD dropped installments in its beloved Black Ops series in two consecutive years.
On one level, the decision made sense. The gap between Black Ops and COD's numerous other series has been widening. But neither the reviews, user numbers or most other metrics have looked as favorably on Black Ops 7 as they did its predecessor.
In many ways, Battlefield 6 plays the franchise's greatest hits with beautiful tactical destruction, a critical focus on teamwork over glory hogging solo play, and a very realistic setting. It also brought back the game's traditional four player classes: assault, recon, engineer, and support. But each class has different training paths so your medic may not be exactly the same as someone else on the field.
It's a huge return to form after the disappointing Battlefield 2042, and potentially a seismic shift in the shooter market.