Battlefield 3 beta played by eight million

DICE has revealed plenty of stats about the recent Battlefield 3 beta – including the total amount of players.

While DICE (via the Battlefield blog) opted not to mention how the figure was divided between the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC versions of the game, the overall tally of players came in at 8,125,310.

47 billion shots were fired, which DICE mentions is enough to travel to the end of the known universe if each one of those bullets represented a light year.

Coincidentally, if each bullet represented 0.005p you’d have £23.5 million – the same amount of money Chelsea spent on Juan Mata.

1.5 billion virtual soldiers were killed during the 10-day beta, which DICE points out is about half the litres of beer consumed by the world in 2011.

I’ve done a little bit of extra research on this one, too: if each killed virtual soldier was half a cake you’d end up with 750m cakes – enough for each user of social media service Facebook to enjoy one cake each.

19 million people also lost their dog tags at the end of a knife. DICE says that’s more than the population of Shanghai, the world’s most populated city.

Here are some more stats: the longest recorded headshot was 635.6 metres, Assault players racked up 2.2 billion points of regenerated health between them, and 21 million M-COM stations were also destroyed.

Elsewhere, DICE has said the Battlefield 3 beta was a ‘huge success’.

Battlefield 3 will be released for Xbox 360, PS3, and PC on October 28.