Battlefield 6 devs knew 'everything' would leak from playtests but said the risk was worth it to get feedback from players: 'That had to come at any cost'
Game developers, generally speaking, don't like leaks. Infinity Nikki studio Infold, for instance, recently described leaks as "poison to all creation." That's maybe a bit much, but it does capture the broad sentiment: When you're working on something that's meant to be a surprise, and someone blows that surprise, it sucks.
Developers do what they can to prevent leaks, but sometimes there's just no getting around it. Such is the case with Battlefield 6: Technical director Christian Buhl told IGN that Ripple Effect (formerly DICE LA) "did not want leaks," but it did want as much feedback from players as possible—and that meant rolling the dice.
"We had, actually, discussions, I think about a year or two ago," Buhl said. "I guess it was maybe about two years ago, about how much we were going to do to prevent leaks versus how much we were going to do to get the game in front of players. We made a very deliberate decision that we were going to bias very heavily towards putting things in front of players and getting their feedback, even though we knew things would leak."
Sure enough, that's exactly what happened: The Battlefield Labs program is technically a closed testing platform, but it's been leaking like a sieve pretty much from the word go. That came as no surprise to developers—Buhl said he made a "big presentation" at one point where he asked rhetorically, and answered, "What will leak? Everything"—and it was ultimately viewed as a necessary price to pay: "We weren't seeking leaks, but we knew that the most important thing was to get the game in front of players, get real feedback from players, get real telemetry, real data, and that had to come at any cost, including the fact that things would leak."
Feedback from players is undoubtedly vital, especially when you're making a game that aims to compete with the Call of Duty juggernaut. But there's another significant benefit, as PC Gamer's Morgan Park pointed out back in May when he wrote, "the Battlefield subreddit is an endless feed of leaked Battlefield 6 gameplay, and it might be the best marketing campaign of 2025."
Leaks generate excitement that promotional trailers and developer streams can't, because they're "real" in a way that carefully curated marketing campaigns simply are not. And if that excitement generates demand for even more leaked material going forward, that has to be a lot better than people ignoring your game because nobody cares.
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