Former Blizzard boss Mike Ybarra thinks Battlefield 6 "will boot stomp" Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 this year, which he reckons will be a great outcome for FPS games as a whole.
Battlefield 6's open beta kicked off yesterday, opening its doors to a peak of 334,549 concurrent players on Steam, and promptly becoming the most popular Battlefield game on the platform by an enormous margin. Needless to say, the full game is already shaping up to be a major hit, two months before its launch, and the ex-Blizzard president thinks it's going to blow Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 out of the water.
"Battlefield will boot stomp CoD this year," Ybarra declares on Twitter. "But the real win here is CoD won't be lazy anymore, and we'll all get better FPS games for it."
Elaborating on this further down in his thread, Ybarra says that "CoD has gone downhill for years" since 2016's Infinite Warfare. He continues: "Cheating, heavy UI/install, rainbow colors. People are sick of it. Luckily BF will force them to change it."
Battlefield will boot stomp CoD this year. But the real win here is CoD won’t be lazy anymore, and we’ll all get better FPS games for it.August 8, 2025
Whether this will actually happen remains to be seen, but we already know a couple of ways in which Battlefield 6 has addressed the concerns Ybarra mentions. It has a surprisingly compact file size, with Steam listing 55GB as the minimum amount of storage required to install it (seemingly helped by the option to install components like single-player and multiplayer separately).
As for cosmetics, the devs have stressed that it was "really important" to the team for skins to "feel grounded" and "authentic to the franchise." That means that – unless any exceptions are made later down the line – we can expect Battlefield 6 to avoid following in the footsteps of CoD with its wild crossovers and brightly colored outfits.
While Battlefield 6 is set to launch on October 10, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 still has a vague 2025 release window. We'll just have to wait and see how the two compare in the coming months.
Be sure to check out our guide on how to access the Battlefield 6 beta while you're here.
