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During its quarterly investor’s call on Tuesday, EA said we can expect the next Battlefield game to release sometime during its 2026 fiscal year.
Different companies define their fiscal years differently. EA is currently in its 2025 fiscal year, but that ends this March, after which the 2026 fiscal year begins. So, where EA is concerned, the 2026 financial year starts this April. Yeah, it’s baffling, but that’s how they do it, and it means that the next Battlefield will be out sometime between this April and the start of April 2026, if everything goes to plan.
Things could change, of course: Answering a question during the call, EA CEO Andrew Wilson said that if the FY2026 release window turns out not to be ideal—say, because of a big competing game—the timing could change. I also doubt that EA plans to release the new Battlefield this calendar year, even though it’s within its release window. Sometime early next year seems most likely.
Still, I’m mildly surprised it’s coming so soon: EA keeps talking up how big this new Battlefield will be, and it was only last year that DICE said it was fully moving on from Battlefield 2042 to focus entirely on the new game.
On Monday, EA announced Battlefield Labs, a new playtesting program that will inform development of this as-yet-unnamed Battlefield game. We also saw a brief snippet of gameplay: It looks a lot like Battlefield 3, which aligns with our expectations. After the dire initial reception of Battlefield 2042, EA said explicitly that the next one will emulate Battlefield 3 and 4.
BF2042 was released not long after it was revealed, with just a couple obligatory beta sessions in between. After players ripped into it at launch, DICE went into ‘we hear your feedback’ mode and made substantial changes over the next couple years. I was an outlier in that I liked BF2042 from the start, but it did get a lot better over time by many accounts.
Despite the less-than-ideal launch of BF2042, EA committed heavily to the series after it came out. The publisher put Respawn co-founder Vince Zampella—formerly of Call of Duty dev Infinity Ward—in charge of the franchise, and has multiple studios working on it: DICE, as usual, plus Criterion, Motive, and Ripple Effect. The latter is the studio that made the cool Battlefield Portal server hosting feature in BF2042, and it’s working on a “new experience” that hasn’t been detailed.
“We’ve invested more in this Battlefield than any Battlefield before,” said Wilson. “We have four studios. We’ve had a meaningful amount of time. We’re looking for this to be the biggest Battlefield we’ve ever made.”
This time, they’re getting players in for testing much earlier—sign ups for Battlefield Labs are open now.
“There is some trepidation amongst the core community as to what this Battlefield will be,” Wilson said in response to a question about the reception of Battlefield Labs. “Battlefield is this incredible franchise, at unbelievable scale, with destruction and vehicles and all kinds of things, and is much loved in the community. The last two iterations of Battlefield have not resonated as strongly and have been found wanting by meaningful parts of the community globally. And so we do appreciate and understand that there is some trepidation there, and this development team, the biggest development team we’ve ever had, is committed to working very closely with our players to ensure that they understand what we’re doing, that they feed into the tuning and balancing at scale of this game.”
EA is hurting a little right now—both Dragon Age: The Veilguard and EA Sports FC failed to meet the publisher’s projections over the past three months—so there’s perhaps a little extra pressure on Battlefield to be a big deal, and to avoid significant delays.
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Kurt Indovina
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