Battlefield Release Date Change

It is good practice for studios to temper expectations, giving players wide release windows to allow plenty of flexibility on the road to putting a big title out.

While keeping things deliberately vague is common, gaming giant Electronic Arts went for an unconventional approach about the new Battlefield release date.

The company revealed its projected release window during its Q3 FY2025 earnings call. According to the meeting notes, EA hopes to release the untitled Battlefield game between April 2025 and April 2026.

This announcement gave EA a nice clean window to move the release about based on competition moves, and the feedback received during its new community playtesting program.

What is confusing some players is CEO Andrew Wilson’s comments released immediately after.

During a Q&A session, Wilson said “there may be some things happening in the year that may cause us to think differently about our launch timing.”

On the same cautious tone, he advanced that if the developers “got close to that time frame and believe that this wasn’t going to be a great window”, the company would then “look at what an alternate window might be”.

Playing safe is nothing revolutionary, especially during a meeting with investors, but the exact threats and possibilities that could result in a delay leave some room to the imagination.

Fear Of GTA, Or In-Genre Threats?

Multiple journalists and players attribute EA’s cautious approach to the impending launch of Grand Theft Auto 6.

Saying those words is slightly surreal, but it looks like the game will come out in the near future (and well before Star Citizen‘s Squadron 42 campaign).

GTA 6 is indeed guaranteed to be the biggest release of 2025 or 2026, but there are other, arguably more pertinent competitors that EA may be watching out for.

After putting the franchise on hold since 2019, Ubisoft will bring a new Ghost Recon title sometime in 2026, alleged to be the brand’s biggest tactical shooter yet.

Rumors also point to Activision releasing a new installment to the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare franchise next year, which poses a much bigger threat to Battlefield sales than a GTA title could.

Regardless of the impact the Rockstar giant has, beating Call of Duty to the punch would go a long way in helping Battlefield make up ground on its historical rival.

Way down the budget metrics, there are promising titles like ’83 (from the developers of Rising Storm 2: Vietnam) coming out within the year, and the highly anticipated release of ARMA 4 in 2027.

There is no ‘safe’ release date for Battlefield to monopolize the attention in the next two years.