Battlefield 1 - On this day

Electronic Arts, with its Battlefield series, has long sought the success that Activision had with Call of Duty. Battlefield 3 came close to that, but the real turnaround in the battle of the two titans happened in 2016. First, Call of Duty got its "space episode" which fans did not accept very well, and Battlefield 1 took the opportunity, whose announcement "ignited" the Internet.

The famous first trailer with which the game was revealed was the most-watched trailer for a video game from 2016. It was superbly directed, accompanied by hectic music, and remembered as one of the best-accepted game trailers.

Battlefield 1 received the most positive reactions by changing the environment, ie returning to the First World War. Development studio DICE has managed to create a romanticized version with shovels, war gases, and airships from this slow and dirty historical conflict. Interestingly, however, DICE was initially denied the idea of a WW1 game, and Electronic Arts only gave the green light for it when DICE made a demo version of the game. 

That the game would be a big hit was already seen in open testing two months earlier. More than 13 million players took part in the beta test. Battlefield 1 was launched with a short single-player campaign and a modest amount of nine multiplayer maps. However, neither technical issues nor a lack of content turned down fans who craved team gameplay and Battlefield destruction. And on the other hand, people didn’t particularly like the space Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare.

The initial success of Battlefield 1 ensured long-term support for additional content. In the next year and a half, a total of four expansions were launched: They Shall Not Pass, In the Name of the Tsar, Turning Tides, and Apocalypse. Two years later the game was inherited by Battlefield V, but many players chose to stay with Battlefield 1.

Moreover, the number of active players is solid even five years later, which was helped by the arrival of the game on Steam. Just in the middle of this year, Battlefield 1 was the most active on Steam, where more than 40,000 players knew how to play it at the same time.