Battlefield 5's Poor Sales Numbers Have Become a Disaster For Electronic Arts (seekingalpha.com)

dryriver writes: Electronic Arts has mismanaged the Battlefield franchise in the past -- BF3 and BF4 were not great from a gameplay perspective -- but with Battlefield 5, Electronic Arts is facing a real disaster that has sent its stock plummeting on the stock exchanges. First came the fierce cultural internet backlash from gamers to the Battlefield 5 reveal trailer -- EA tried to inject so much 21st Century gender diversity and Hollywood action-movie style fighting into what was supposed to be a reasonably historically accurate WWII shooter trailer, that many gamers felt the game would be "a seriously inauthentic portrayal of what WW2 warfare really was like." Then the game sold very poorly after a delayed launch date -- far less than the mildly successful WW1 shooter Battlefield 1 for example -- and is currently discounted by 33% to 50% at all major game retailers to try desperately to push sales numbers up. This was also a disaster for Nvidia, as Battlefield 5 was the tentpole title supposed to entice gamers into buying expensive new realtime ray-tracing Nvidia 2080 RTX GPUs.

Electronic Arts had to revise its earnings estimates for 2019, some hedge funds sold off their EA stock, fearing low sales and stiff competition from popular Battle Royal games like Fortnite and PUBG, and EA stock is currently 45% down from its peak value in July 2018. EA had already become seriously unpopular with gamers because of annoying Battlefield franchise in-game mechanisms such as heaving to buy decent-aiming-accuracy weapons with additional cash, having to constantly pay for additional DLC content and game maps, and the very poor multiplayer gameplay of its two Star Wars: Battlefront titles (essentially Battlefield with laser blasters set in the Star Wars Universe). It seems that with Battlefield 5, EA -- not a company known for listening to its customers -- finally hit a brick wall, in the form of many Battlefield fans simply not buying or playing Battlefield 5.

Comments

Re:DICE is the real problem

[stealth_finger]

Meanwhile, you get to hear them dying around you, which triggers very different feelings of failure in men than hearing males perish.

Who could have foreseen that THAT would not sell?!

Have you played it? Does that actually happen to you? Does that happen to anyone? You're confusing real war with a video game war. The, lets say. female vocalisations are barely noticeable at best. It's just all this theory nonsense about why women aren't really allowed in proper frontlines warfare which is fair enough to an extent and assuming the exact same principles will apply in a game. Spoiler alert, they don't. The female models aren't even that distinguishable visually from the males unless they're right in your face picking you up and then they are gone again.

I agree that there was no need to do it and women's representation in war in general is kinda fine really but still, the amount it effects the gameplay is exactly zero and any issues resulting from it are just fucking stupid. In hindsight for them I bet they wish they'd left it at having the female led war story single player bit they did but yeah, it's a non issue really.

Re: Who would have thunk?

[AmiMoJo]

This is a game where you don't have any kind of health meter or injury system. Stuff materialises out of thin air for you. The whole thing is highly unrealistic and when given the choice will always sacrifice realism for gameplay.

In fact the major legitimate criticism of it is that it's too "Hollywood" and lacks realism.