EA's Head Blames Marketing, Development Delay for Low "Battlefield V" Sales

“You should expect that we will be more innovative and more creative around both marketing campaigns and how we bring games to market and more diligent in our operation against execution of the project plans around development of video games going forward,” he said. “I mean, it’s something we are taking very seriously across the full landscape of development.” Wilson later went on to note that “Titanfall 2” also struggled with a marketing problem.

Translation: Time to work developers 90 hrs a week instead of just 70.

Fuck this assclown.
 
In other words franchise fatigue is a myth. Nothing to see here. Now move along.
 
You guys need a modern Battlefield game EA srly...... Nobody is buying these WWI WWII games because it's like your Grandpas COD. Battlefield Hardline I thought was a pretty decent game even I got a free copy from the Intel Retail Edge program but it was a fun game untill the servers went empty like last year or so.
 
You guys need a modern Battlefield game EA srly......
Nobody is buying these WWI WWII games because it's like your Grandpas COD. Battlefield Hardline I thought was a pretty decent game even I got a free copy from the Intel Retail Edge program but it was a fun game untill the servers went empty like last year or so.
I'm still waiting for someone to do a modern take on the Gulf War. Prior to Battlefield going all Tolkien on us it seemed like the perfect series to go there.
 
I also was a huge BF fan and have played every game released up to Battlefield 1 which was terrible. Battlefield 1 was not only just bad but overrun with hackers and when I played Battlefield 5 beta I found it was even worse than BF1 so I went back to playing mostly single player games.
 
But you know what? People generally do not understand conditional sentences. They will ignore the "if" part.

Yes - especially if it's left out of a quote. The game dev responded forthrightly and isn't responsible for his remarks being misrepresented down the line, especially by journos who can read English. The people who misrepresent them are responsible. And what Sony did or didn't ever say - possibly equally misrepresented - has nothing to do with this story. Throwing that in is just more fuddle-talk, only pretending to make a point.

they put out the least known battles of WW2, most of them are before D-Day

That's a plus, not a negative! We've seen the "most known" battles fifty times! EA could be roasted for returning to those yet again! And of course the devs want to do something new and interesting. They did a great job on the "Nordlys" heavy water plant episode. The terrain and buildings were gorgeously rendered, and with enough historical accuracy to show that these people had done their homework.

The fact that the Nordlys fighter was a woman is hardly an immersion issue, as in an FPS you never see yourself! And I can't understand the moaning about it being unrepresentative, especially since all the other war story leads were men - as in 99.9999% of the WW2 games to date. As for realism, well, gender is the least unrealistic aspect of a game like this.

There are genuine things to complain of in EA games, including this one, but what they did here with settings, characters, and story is admirable. I personally was unenthusiastic about being on the German side, in episode 4, which BTW was very "post D-Day" as if that matters. But a theme of the game was that the war was huge and there are many unknown stories. Bravo to EA for going there.
 
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I used to play BF4 but after a while I found having to repeat the whole chapter if I got killed (even if near the end of that chapter) rather stupid so I no longer play the game

Here I agree with you 1000%. Game devs and publishers - not to mention gamers - have no idea how much fun and replay value they're losing with a checkpoint-only system. Crysis was a model in this regard - you could save at any time and thus revisit every aspect of every scenario, playing them multiple ways for years to come.

As only one example, in BF V "Nordlys / dockyard" I wanted to try climbing the giant scaffold to see what the flamer guys would do, but it's way too tedious to play the whole level yet again to get there. Without quicksave you just want to get through each story without dying... so a great deal of the fun is lost.

"Quicksave" should at least be an option, which can be off by default, in a setting on the "Difficulty" screen. It's simply idiotic to leave this out, and then wonder why more people aren't buying the games.
 
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If EA released the exact game they put out using, instead of the crazy crap they did, major WW2 battles and actual WW2 scenarios focusing on realism and giving the player a semi-realistic view into what it was like to actually be there....

then they wouldn't be having these problems.

IMO injecting the kinds of politics they did into the game marginalizes the WW2 horrors and is pretty offensive... just go on youtube and look up "World War 2 excavation" and you can get some present-day insight into how hideous this war really was. Some youtube channels set about excavating remains of dead soldiers, multiple people buried on top of each other in mass graves etc. Maybe EA employees should be watching this kind stuff in their sensitivity training sessions (WW2 sensitivity training).
 
injecting the kinds of politics they did into the game marginalizes the WW2 horrors and is pretty offensive

This is one of the dumbest comments I've seen. First, if you wanted a game about Auschwitz or Babi Yar, you must have misunderstood the ads. I can't remember any game that has ever focused on the horrors - but you pick on BF V as being remiss in this?

Second, what "politics" were injected? Are you saying the proto-SBS, African and German troops, and Norwegian resistance actually weren't there? And how is setting these less-known episodes "offensive"? It's offensive to imply that none of these people or what they did should be remembered at all, even to the extent of one episode in one game.

Finally: this is a game, not a simulation. As such the writers are working in the time-honored genre of historical fiction. That's what movie writers do too, which is why "Saving Private Ryan" wasn't marketed as a documentary. To mix all this up and then complain of the result is just meaningless bitching.
 
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Yep, not at all a out business tactics onto roping gamers into habitual gamblers and turning people intobwhale revenue streams.
 
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This is one of the dumbest comments I've seen. First, if you wanted a game about Auschwitz or Babi Yar, you must have misunderstood the ads. I can't remember any game that has ever focused on the horrors - but you pick on BF V as being remiss in this?

Second, what "politics" were injected? Are you saying the proto-SBS, African and German troops, and Norwegian resistance actually weren't there? And how is setting these less-known episodes "offensive"? It's offensive to imply that none of these people or what they did should be remembered at all, even to the extent of one episode in one game.

Finally: this is a game, not a simulation. As such the writers are working in the time-honored genre of historical fiction. That's what movie writers do too, which is why "Saving Private Ryan" wasn't marketed as a documentary. To mix all this up and then complain of the result is just meaningless bitching.


You're obviously ignorant of just how badly EA botched the job. I recommend you go do some research before just spitting out ignorant "woke" talking points. EA/DICE marketed the game, especially during the release event with Trevor Noah, as the most realistic and immersive simulation of World War 2 that has ever been produced. Then they released a game where they rewrote history and attempted to add Fortnite-type customizations to get some of those sweet microtransaction bucks.

Extremely well-researched video detailing just how badly they rewrote history to be more "inclusive", which is political in 2018/2019:




Additionally to this, DICE told players that if they weren't interested in their revisionist history (totally disregarding their campaign saying it was the most realistic and immersive evah!) they shouldn't buy the game. They trotted out woke talking points saying that they wouldn't release a game where their daughters couldn't play as girls, just like in Fortnite. Obviously this is a big mistake if you are trying to market it to grown adults who know the difference between WW2 and a cartoon style battle royale game.
 
Yes - especially if it's left out of a quote. The game dev responded forthrightly and isn't responsible for his remarks being misrepresented down the line, especially by journos who can read English. The people who misrepresent them are responsible. And what Sony did or didn't ever say - possibly equally misrepresented - has nothing to do with this story. Throwing that in is just more fuddle-talk, only pretending to make a point.
You can be sure that many people read the full Sony quote. And what they took away from it was "get a second job". This is the exact same situation that we are seeing with BF5 and it was, like totally expected for anybody who knows even the slightest bit about PR.

Defending this shit and placing the blame on "remarks being misrepresented down the line" is just asinine.
 
You're obviously ignorant of just how badly EA botched the job. I recommend you go do some research before just spitting out ignorant "woke" talking points. EA/DICE marketed the game, especially during the release event with Trevor Noah, as the most realistic and immersive simulation of World War 2 that has ever been produced. Then they released a game where they rewrote history and attempted to add Fortnite-type customizations to get some of those sweet microtransaction bucks.

Extremely well-researched video detailing just how badly they rewrote history to be more "inclusive", which is political in 2018/2019:




Additionally to this, DICE told players that if they weren't interested in their revisionist history (totally disregarding their campaign saying it was the most realistic and immersive evah!) they shouldn't buy the game. They trotted out woke talking points saying that they wouldn't release a game where their daughters couldn't play as girls, just like in Fortnite. Obviously this is a big mistake if you are trying to market it to grown adults who know the difference between WW2 and a cartoon style battle royale game.


Thank you
 
It went on sale 50% after two months already , i think i even saw it for 15-20$



Anyway , i think the real issue with BF5 is content , they put out the least known battles of WW2 , most of them are before D-Day , no Russian/American armies , No pacific front , no naval warfare, so what did they expect?
This is in a way a step back from BF1942 that had some of the 'greatest' battles of WW2 , perhaps they are saving those for the next year of updates till BF6
Then if it really did go up at 50% almost right away then they made far less than then they probably only made close to 300 million not nearly enough to even pay for development on the next title, so yeah a complete failure. But blaming this on a small development delay is pure scapegoating and somebody is trying to just butter up investors hard.
 
I would count myself among those who don’t care, but I think it still had a measurable impact on sales because:

A) A lot of people I saw online were turned off principally by the smug, virtue signalling attitude coming from the lead designer. They weren’t necessarily incels, but they were people fed up with lectures from corporate types who, at the end of the day, is primarily concerned with making money.

B) Incels and people suffering from male fragility play a lot of video games.

C) DICE really could have had it both ways as you said. Do lady campaigns on British SOE missions or Soviet snipers/tank crews/Night Witches, whatever, and then silence the opposition by saying they chose things specifically from history. They still might have lost incel customers, but they would have retained core players that were just turned off by the general virtue signalling of it all.

I don't think the "women in the game" angle has anything to do with it. I think the primary factors are as follows in order of impact.
  1. You are selling a game that is basically a mod or expansion pack for a game that came out recently(battlefield 1)... For $60-90.
  2. You release said game in a heavily crowded time of year.
  3. You give said game away to people with origin all access passes(your diehard fans).
  4. Profit?
 
I don't think the "women in the game" angle has anything to do with it. I think the primary factors are as follows in order of impact.
  1. You are selling a game that is basically a mod or expansion pack for a game that came out recently(battlefield 1)... For $60-90.
  2. You release said game in a heavily crowded time of year.
  3. You give said game away to people with origin all access passes(your diehard fans).
  4. Profit?

To be fair, I think a 3.5 item is "alienate your most die-hard players" which usually does screw up sales. They aren't a huge group, but they make a lot of posts and videos which can influence others who might not have originally cared about some of the historically-inaccurate issues.

If it were me, I'd have saved the "inclusion stuff" for a futuristic BF title, where could at least believe things are that way in the future - because we don't know. Especially if there's something like powered armor, offsetting or negating physical differences.
 
Re-use previous game's engine, use WW2 as the setting, create some crappy maps, throw in some women to cater to more people, and then try to sell it. Looks like it worked okay for them since 7mil copies sold is a lot.. They probably made a couple hundred million but they are greedy so of course they wanted more. Maybe if the lead designer Patrick Soderlund didn't make stupid comments, they could have sold a bit more. Catering to his daughter also didn't help the situation. There were a lot of angry people about the forced diversity and rewriting of history. Those are just a few of the issues with the game though. It doesn't really introduce anything new either- heck it removes naval combat. It just feels like a crappy mod of some sort.

I think most people would be fine with women in the game if the game's setting took place in some alternate reality or if it was some steampunk shooter since that is what the cover looks like.
 
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I don't think the "women in the game" angle has anything to do with it. I think the primary factors are as follows in order of impact.
  1. You are selling a game that is basically a mod or expansion pack for a game that came out recently(battlefield 1)... For $60-90.
  2. You release said game in a heavily crowded time of year.
  3. You give said game away to people with origin all access passes(your diehard fans).
  4. Profit?
BF5 had a 2 year release window from BF1 and you call it a mod even though it's quite a dramatic change in mechanics/shooting and the engine is also graphically updated. Wouldn't call it an expansion oack.. What was needed was a year more of development time and Dice's leaders not being far left wing and trying to please all genders/LGBT.
 
I am curious of how many of you that say it is garbage have actually played it? I am a long running Battlefield fan, and hated COD. Battlefield 4 is where I started to lose interest. I tried BF1 and enjoyed it, but my interest wasn't held for long. I have got to say, I was hesitant to try BF5, but got the deluxe edition for under $40 (maybe a black friday deal...don't remember) and have logged more hours so far than BF4 and BF1 combined, to my wife's dismay. It feels more like BF3 to me than the last few releases, some maps could be better, but other maps I do enjoy. As far as marketing goes, I had no idea it was coming out until about a month before it was released, so I would say marketing was not done well. I also don't live and breath on content from reviewers/gamers etc., as I am too old and too busy these days.
 
To mix all this up and then complain of the result is just meaningless bitching.

Ah yes, meaningless bitching. Just like what the head of EA is doing. I purposely didn't buy this "WW2 game" because of all the "mixing up" they did. I'm not the one meaninglessly bitching about it, EA is.

.
 
Just so that I'm clear here: The root cause of lower than expected sales is NOT because it launched with only 10% of the promised content? It is NOT because the game, even 94 days after launch, is still loaded with a truly massive number of gameplay-altering bugs? It is NOT because EA was developing a reputation for pushing out crap games loaded with bugs, which BF V ended up turning from mere "reputation" into actual fact? It is NOT because, even ignoring those other things, this simply isn't a particularly good game?

Maybe someone can help clear that up for me.
 
BTW, the real reasons that these results are disappointing:
  • 7.8MM copies at an ASP of $40 is $312MM revenue. The development + marketing spend up until launch was likely on the order of $150MM with another $50MM spent between launch and end of 2019 Q1.
  • By comparison, PUBG had moved 50 million copies back in June 2018
  • Epic pulled in $3,000 MM just in profit in 2018. Yes, with a free game, Epic profits were 3x BF V's total revenue over the same period. And they did this with a FREE (not even freemium) game built on an engine which they also give out for free to competitors. The game is not the only component of their revenue (UE royalties are likely doing pretty well via PUBG), but still. Egg on EA's face there.
  • Sorry, still stuck on the accounting stuff. EA had $5.1b in total revenue in 2018. They have, what, 40 current games at any given moment? Triple that if you count each platform as its own thing? And yet, Epic had $3b in profit with one game they give away for free and a game engine that is mostly free.
This is basically EA's same old annual story. If I were a major shareholder, I'd be in board meetings demanding some heads from the top. This is a broken company.
 
I'm sorry, am I missing something here? 7.3 million sold copies is a "low number"? I think if a product that sold more than 2 million copies would be considered a success.
 
I'm sorry, am I missing something here? 7.3 million sold copies is a "low number"? I think if a product that sold more than 2 million copies would be considered a success.
take into consideration EA massive overheads as well as their commitment to their shareholders (we will have 10million copies) is bad for a board. They won't except that the product is bad, their treatment of the community is bad
 
Extremely well-researched video detailing just how badly they rewrote history to be more "inclusive"
... Obviously this is a big mistake if you are trying to market it to grown adults who know the difference between WW2 and a cartoon style battle royale game.

All of the groups in BF V were really in the war, and paid the price of being at the tip of the spear. Their stories are valid topics for the game; arguably the more so because as numerical minorities they are generally unknown. Except to their families and nations, of course.

Your ax-grinding blinders-on video is hardly a revelation on any point - unless you just don't know much about history to begin. Of course then you're the target audience because your head can be stuffed with agenda cloaked as anti-agenda. Purveyors of such, eg your video source, carefully choose what to criticize and constantly shift their ground. But having bought in, you don't notice that, and can be convinced that black is white. A lot like the kid in the tank at the end of "The Last Tiger", which BTW made constant serious references to the needless death and destruction around, besides being set in a shattered city. No mass graves were dug up, however, so they did let you down there.

The demand for "realism" is, here, pure sophistry. If that was a criterion there'd be no tolerating the comic-book battle mechanics, wherein a lone soldier cuts a swathe through legions of enemies, picking up all manner of critical weapons from open caches, sneaking unheard over any terrain, jumping off cliffs but unable to step over a log, etc. etc. That would all be laughable to begin with.

But instead the obsession is with race and gender - again behind code words of "non-realistic", "revisionist" etc. The fact that the whole thing is historical fiction is ignored. The fact that the gender of any player is functionally irrelevant is ignored. The fact that a great deal of realism - much historically accurate - is achieved through superb graphics and sound, level construction, and vehicle and weapon modeling is ignored. The fact that quality drama is created through excellent writing and voice acting is ignored. The fact that under-represented groups get some deserved exposure is ignored. All in order to bitch about - god help us - picturing a female commando.

You need to figure out where your head is and who put it there. It may help to read more history yourself, and think about it, instead of internalizing some screed.
 
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