The Simultaneous Rise and Decline of Battlefield

An anonymous reader writes: Ben Kuchera at Polygon recommends against buying the upcoming Battlefield Hardline first-person shooter. Not because it's bad — in fact, he doesn't really offer an opinion on how good the game is — but because it's time to stop incentivizing poor behavior from Electronic Arts and its Digital Illusions CE development studio. After EA acquired DICE, Battlefield game launches accelerated, and launch issues with each game were hand-waved away as unpredictable. The studio's principled stand against paid DLC evaporated in order to feed the ever-hungry beast of shareholder value. Kuchera says, "EA continues this because the Battlefield franchise is profitable; we as players have taught them that we'll buy anyway, and continue to support games that don't work at launch." He suggests avoiding pre-orders, and only buying the game if and when it's in a playable (and fun) state. "Every dollar that's spent on Hardline before the game comes out is a vote for things continuing down an anti-consumer path. If the game is a hit before its launch, that sends a message that we're OK with business as usual, and business as usual has become pretty terrible."

Comments

Haha, nobody will do this.

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll keep buying the games as fast as EA pushes them out.

Re:Haha, nobody will do this.

[ZahrGnosis]

I did it. I loved BF3, but I didn't pick up 4 and I won't be picking up Hardline because of EA. In addition to everything the original article mentions, most of which I agree with, one thing not mentioned in the original article is the pay-to-have-everything (which is not "Pay-to-win" only in a very strict sense, but that doesn't make it right).

I don't mind these companies making money, but they do it at the expense of loyal customers, rather than in support of them... I don't think it's a good long-term practice, but that's just me. But it's definitely not nobody.

Re:Haha, nobody will do this.

[dow]

I also decided not to buy BF4, and have been playing Battlefield as part of a clan since BF2 was popular, every game and every expansion pack. I joked to my friends that I would be back for Battlefield 5 in around 12 months time. When Hardline was revealed, I realised I would probably never return to Battlefield.

Re:Haha, nobody will do this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, I opted out after my experience with BF3. Still haven't bought BF4 and don't plan to. Definitely won't bother with Hardline.

The problem with all the paid map packs is that it fractures the player base and massively lowers the server populations. Even if you can afford everything, not everyone can. So the game quickly segments because not everyone is running the same maps. If you have the vanilla maps and back to karkand, you can play on vanilla servers and b2k servers. But you can't play on servers running the other map packs. And people who don't own B2K can't play with you when you're on a server that runs B2K maps. So no matter where you go, you don't have as many choices as if everyone was part of the same map-owning population.

One other bad idea was introducing such an intense equipment/weapon grind in BF3, because even though it got me to play BF3 a lot more, it also soured me on the entire idea of playing the game going forward. Most of my memories of BF3 are of grinding out weapons on high ticket Metro Meatgrinder servers. In my memory, most of the game was dominated by grinding instead of playing. There was grinding in BF2, but it was a grand total of half a dozen weapons and everyone had them all pretty quickly. There weren't 20 different attachments for each weapon and 30 different subtly different assault rifles, etc. Maybe it made the gameplay less varied, but in BF2 people mostly just focused on playing the game instead of grinding unlocks. The medal grinding in BF2 didn't seem as big an annoyance.

Re:Haha, nobody will do this.

[Algae_94]

I don't mind these companies making money, but they do it at the expense of loyal customers, rather than in support of them... I don't think it's a good long-term practice, but that's just me.

Funny thing is your average hard drug dealer does the same thing. They make money at the detriment of their loyal customers. They know they'll keep coming back because they are horribly addicted and have nothing else to do. If they eventually do lose a customer, they find a new crowd of young customers that haven't gone through the cycle as many times to get jaded.

Re:Haha, nobody will do this.

[Xest]

I think the article misses the way modern economies work too. It doesn't matter if it's profitable, shareholders nowadays want to see increasing profits year on year.

You don't need millions of people to boycott it so that the production makes a loss, you only need thousands like yourself and I that mean it makes less money than it has in previous years.

If there's no profit growth, investors will start to notice and start asking questions and demanding a change in direction.

So yes, absolutely boycott, you can make a different, you don't need everyone to boycott, just enough to give up on it each year that it suffers declining sales.

Re:Haha, nobody will do this.

[nabsltd]

I've been computer/console gaming since the early 80's and one thing I learned by the 90's. Never pre order any game. NEVER.

And, if having the game at the same time as other people isn't required for play (e.g., if multiplayer isn't your primary play style), then just wait until you can get the game at 20% of original cost.

I've spent around $110 on the Steam summer sale, but I picked up 17 games, many of them "AAA", and by now I really know if the game stands the test of time.

Re:Haha, nobody will do this.

[stealth_finger]

OT, but you didn't look very hard at all, then. The very first links on Google for "Smartphone Market Share" show WP with 3.2-3.3% for Q1 2014, and on a rising trajectory. (https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Market-Rankings/comScore-Reports-March-2014-US-Smartphone-Subscriber-Market-Share). The top (non-Wikipedia) link on Bing for the same search is less precise but says 3%. (http://www.cio.com/article/751867/U.S._Smartphone_Market_Share_Numbers_for_Q1_2014). Those are US numbers; the European numbers are significantly higher. It's still the third-place platform, but it *is* third place behind the two giants.

What's in fourth place? As it stands today there are only three horses and the other two are miles away.

In other words, Don't Pay for Promises.

[Thatto]

Pay for Value.

Holy shit, this IS news for nerds

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

You say EA pumps out crap games and people buy them in droves anyways? Do tell.

Warriors, unite!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been pirating their games for years. According to industry numbers, I've done millions of dollars in damage. If we all band together, we can bankrupt the company.

Unless they're wholly full of shit about the piracy issue, and we all know that EA wouldn't lie to us.

Re:Warriors, unite!

[Anonymous Coward]

The main problem is that so many people confuse not gaining something with losing something.

Re:Or Be an Adult

[war4peace]

Adults don't stop playing games. As a matter of fact, humans never stop playing games throughout their entire lives. Haven't you seen old men playing chess or backgammon? Football, soccer, even courting are all games. Even haggling is a game in a certain sense.

Re:Doesn't matter...

[Hsien-Ko]

The non modern warfare game's you mention did not get a hi score in game informer. You say your a gamer and u have better first person shooter's... proof it

I bet your not playing it on a xbox 360 which is 3 times more powerful then the current pc so you're argument is invalid.

[/eternalseptember00]

Re:Doesn't matter...

[rgbscan]

"I bet your not playing it on a xbox 360 which is 3 times more powerful then the current pc so you're argument is invalid."

Thanks. I needed a good laugh to end my day :-)

Good luck with this

[Crashmarik]

Gamers have always been willing to accept virtually non existent levels of software quality and never seem willing to hold the developers feet to the fire over the issues. If you look at most MMOs they seem to use design flaws as content these days balance problems and re-balancing combat/roles seem to be top design failures with very little legitimate cause.

No thanks...

[Lumpy]

BF4 was completely unplayable. It was early alpha quality that they pushed out. I am NEVER buying another game from that franchise again. EA can stuff it in their rear end.

I'm in the beta and...

[Redbehrend]

I'm in the beta and I can see people enjoying it that enjoy games like cs:go, payday, etc... I don't see why people hate, just don't buy it if you don't want to play it. I agree not to pre-order most games since they drop in price usually a couple weeks later. I enjoy the frostbyte engine over most fps, engines. I'm sure it will have its click of players if they support it right.

Re:"Inciting"

[Stormy Dragon]

This isn't true.

Etymology of "incentive":

Middle English, from Late Latin incentivum, from neuter of incentivus stimulating, from Latin, setting the tune, from incentus, past participle of incinere to play (a tune), from in- + canere to sing

Etymology of "incite":

Middle French inciter, from Latin incitare, from in- + citare to put in motion

The two words come from completely different Latin roots and arrived in English from completely different sources.

Re:Or Be an Adult

[JaredOfEuropa]

"We don't stop playing because we grow old, we grow old when we stop playing"

Meh

[ScienceofSpock]

The only GOOD Battlefield was BF 1942 and its expansions. When BF:Vietnam came out and allowed picking any primary class with any secondary class, it just ruined the game, killed cooperation and turned it into a free-for-all.

Re:Simultaneous Rising & Falling ?

[desdinova 216]

it's doing both at the same time, it's Schrodinger's Franchise.

Another lost customer

[melting_clock]

I have bought pretty much every PC release of Battlefield. BF3 was the low point for me, with regular connectivity issues ruining the game, include a long period of EA blaming a DDoS attack. It is painful to be kicked off of server part way through a round because the DRM lost connection to EA servers... There were more in game bugs than an previous release. Origin is an added annoyance. The fact that I had spent $1000 upgrading my gaming PC for BF3 didn't help.

BF4 seems to be been rushed out well before it should have been and was full of in game bugs, like invisible objects, constant crashes under a range of conditions, more connectivity issues. It is only fairly recently that most of these have been fixed.

No release has been immune to aimbots and other hacks but the inclusion of a kill cam did give some amusing views of them in action. I remember being killed by someone shooting from one end of the map to the other in BF3, with their shots needing to go through several walls and floors to get me. This happened many times in several rounds and the useless cheater detection never picked them up. The number of glitches that allowed players to get outside the map to either sneak around or kill those inside the map was amazing.

After two releases I regret wasting my time and money on, I've decided to blacklist EA and DICE on all platforms. The positive side is that it got me to buy several games on Steam, including a few nice cross platform games that I play on Linux. I am not going to miss EA or their Origin crap.

Re:Maybe it's my age . . .

[vux984]

By then I'll have the most up-to-date version hopefully with all the kinks worked out, plus DLC that will be included ("Gold Package", "Collectors Edition" etc) or cheap to download. I've been buying games like this for years now.

Without the release day buyers, there's not going to be a collectors edition at 50% off a year later.

So you should thank the early adopters / launch day lemmings, because your buying habits are only sustainable on their backs.

Valve can't count to three

[tepples]

Sure, Valve fairly consistently produces value. But what do you do once you complete the first two games in a particular franchise?