Shooter Monthly #9: Battlefield's Hot Streak, Gears Goes Helldiving, and the Battle Pass Plateau

September 4, 2026

Every major shooter is rebuilding its battle pass at once, and none of it fixes ARPU. Call of Duty stacked loyalty boosts into BlackCell, Overwatch let players pick their tracks, and Battlefield started returning pass items to the store. The battle pass is the only monetization surface Western shooters let themselves touch, and it organizes engagement without generating the revenue a live service team needs.

Shooter Monthly #9 is here with Christopher Anjos, Chris Sides, Feras Musmar, and Phillip Black. With Feras drawing on his years inside Battlefield, we read the summer leaderboards, ask why Apex Legends is suddenly Steam's top earner, and argue over whether Gears of War: E-Day should chase Helldivers instead of legacy PvP.

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We talk about:

Battlefield's platform-split scoreboard: over the last six weeks Battlefield sits fifth in shooter MAU on both Steam (2.2M) and PlayStation (3.4M). Call of Duty misses the PC top ten entirely despite its unified Steam SKU, yet ranks second on PlayStation at 10M behind Fortnite's 27.5M. "Battlefield is beating COD" depends on which platform you look at.
The best-retaining Battlefield yet: the franchise's first free-to-play SKU in RedSec, seasonal reacquisition spikes that keep getting bigger, Wake Island landing mid-season four, ranked play graduating from Battlefield Labs to the full game, and the Elite Top 250 ladder. Feras on why leaderboards belong late in a roadmap (hackers) and why a 250-player cap keeps them maintainable.
What Battlefield does next: no Battlefield 7 next year, so the plan hinges on whether the new Call of Duty delivers, and on extraction, with DMZ returning, Arc Raiders applying pressure, and 2042's and BFV's premium-locked modes as cautionary tales. The franchise still needs its own version of COD's zig-and-zag release rhythm.
The Call of Duty unification trap: one engine and shared progression saved money at first, then produced per-title weapon-compatibility messes, carried-forward cosmetics greeting every new buyer with Nicki Minaj, and UX complexity that tracks directly with losing players. RIP Warzone Mobile, which "killed a lot of phones."
Apex Legends tops Steam's weekly revenue chart over Counter-Strike: the game in its best state ever, updates that never burn the player base, EA's supply-side expansion across Respawn and its Madison studio, mobile-style live ops run by mobile-bred PMs, mini passes tied to characters, heirloom shards, and the nerve to ship a new vaulting mechanic a decade in.
Collabs done right and the China thesis: Final Fantasy items instead of crossover characters, so the universe stays intact; Apex's underrated pull in Japan; and Anjos's claim that no top shooter has a bigger foothold in China, which makes Apex the best positioned of them all for the next five to ten years.
Should Apex Mobile come back: Anjos says the bar is now Call of Duty Mobile's breadth, with battle royale, arena, and zombies at matching quality. Sides wants a small, scoped single-mode test before AAA risk-aversion bloats the project. Feras wants the real first-person game this time, not the old third-person SKU. The panel entertains a Free Fire-style shooter built on Apex movement.
Why side modes keep failing: Anjos's thesis that battle royale plus movement is a match made in heaven, because huge skill gaps don't sting when you exit a losing game instantly, while timed arena modes are torture on the losing side. Feras adds the social sandbox angle: BR made losing okay and expanded the shooter audience, the same accessibility trick Arc Raiders pulled for extraction.
Gears of War: E-Day's record beta: a roughly 15,000-concurrent Steam peak that beats every prior Gears release on the platform, a plausible five-million-plus seller despite its "dad's IP" reputation, and an October launch window shared with GTA 6 and the new Call of Duty.
The Helldivers question: Phillip's case for dumping legacy arena PvP and going extraction-or-bust on the Horde legacy. Sides and Feras push back: an old IP carries PvP expectations you must satisfy at launch, and no team can feed PvE and PvP content treadmills at once. Feras's warning: war bonds work because they only sell gameplay in a PvE game. Put them in a PvP economy and shit hits the fan.
The battle pass changes, taken together: BlackCell's stacking loyalty XP boosts (a rare Western VIP program), Overwatch's player-selected tracks trading late-joiner value against menu-ing away engagement, and Battlefield returning pass items to the store after a three-month blackout. FOMO cratering little by little across the genre.
War bonds are not battle passes: Feras's taxonomy. A battle pass is seasonal progression that expires. War bonds are DLC packs that persist, which is why Helldivers 2 defines its seasons through major orders and narrative arcs instead of pass expiry. Plus his theory that 90% of Fortnite's endless pass redesigns are change for change's sake, because progression systems go stale by design.
The ARPU plea and the Reddit tax: Phillip's argument that Western shooters still haven't attached enough marginal ARPU to support healthy live service teams. Sides's rant that fear of Reddit ceded monetization innovation to Eastern developers ("Genshin Impact could not have been made by EA"), and why war-bond-style invention keeps coming from AA studios rather than AAA.
Next episode: the crew goes deep on War Dogs.