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

Took longer than I thought

[Anonymous Coward]

Microtransactions, seven types of premium version, and the same formulaic products are finally starting to sour the tastes of the purchasing public.

I have no idea why it took this long to happen but I'm unsurprised that it eventually has. Releasing what is ostensibly the same game five times in a row was surely never going to keep making good money.

Then again it works for Apple.

Zeitgeist Market

[mentil]

Marketing no longer has a stranglehold on the zeitgeist. Free/cheap multiplayer games are in at the moment; why pay $60 to play that new game some people are playing, when you can pay $0-$30 to play that game everyone's playing? It's like the WoW network effects, only if it were F2P. There were plenty of comparable F2P MMORPGs but they never rose to the prominence of WoW.

Another interpretation is that gamers are burned out on cinematic FPSes or deathmatch. Remember when Horde Mode was all the rage a few years back? Battle Royale is the same. If anything, this is proof that graphics don't automatically sell games. If this translates into publishers no longer thinking of shooters as a 'safe bet' then I see that as a good thing, as they are a huge portion of AAA action games.

Re:Zeitgeist Market

[JaredOfEuropa]

Maybe. Though I think that the network effect plays a much bigger role in an MMO, where people are much more socially invested in the game than in a casual shooter with short rounds and little if any social interaction. Total number of player also matters a lot more for MMOs, where insufficiently populated shards tend do die out. In games like BF or Fortnite, you can basically grab the next 24-64 players off the global queue and populate a game with them (doesn't work quite like that, but it almost amounts to the same thing).

What brought Fortnite to prominence is not a network effect, but word of mouth about a really fun F2P game. Not the same thing.

Re:Who would have thunk?

[Mashiki]

Can you tell me how many black females with amputations and prosthesis were fighting in WWII on the front lines? Cause that's the message EA was trying to push with BFV. Give you an example of proper marketing. If I'm playing The Witcher 3, the story may be about Ciri but it's driven by Geralt. If I'm playing Metro, Anna may play a key part but it's driven by Artyom. BFV is not driven by the tiny minority of people that had lost limbs. If so, a better representation would have been geriatrics post-cataract surgery sitting on the English shoreline and watching for Morse-UV flashes from operatives in France.

This is Patrick Soderlund fault

[slashmydots]

He literally said if you don't like the inclusion of a woman with disabilities (very inaccurately) on the front line then you're ignorant and shouldn't buy the game. So nobody bought the game and he took a big bonus and quit. They also added in mission where the French are seen as racist against black people, which is completely and utterly inaccurate to those two groups actually working together during the war. Then they took a special ops mission and replaced the actual heroes with women and claimed it was historically accurate. This disgraceful lunacy in the twisted version of reality that these SJW assholes live in is so vast it can crash and entire project/company/product. Every SJW and far left liberal nut job needs to lose their job after this wonderful public display of how crazy these people are.

So before anyone judges those evil gamers...

[AbRASiON]

The article is slightly off, in that itâ(TM)s implying that gamers took issue with EA misrepresenting women in historical battles.
Well, look, some of them did, for sure.

However, as usual, if I recall, the backlash was due to EA / DICE responding, effectively that anyone who takes issue with women in gaming, in any capacity is clearly a basement dweller, behind the times, gamergater or some other thing. (Something, to this effect, was said, if I recall correctly)

So much like GameGate itself, what happens is some idiots shout and whine and then, in response to this, someone says something over the top, in a blanket generalisation kind of way, next thing you know, youâ(TM)ve pissed people off who actually werenâ(TM)t that bad. So begins divisiveness *(ie: skub vs anti-skub)

So to go back on topic, /some/ people probably just said âoeGee, this seems a little historically inaccurate, why canâ(TM)t you just make the women in this be X, who were actually in the war and were badass!â And those guys (or even girls) were called chauvinists.

This keeps on going on, on the internet, as much as it sucks to walk on eggshells, people continue to not be careful and end up inciting this kind of thing.

Also, free âvirtual signalâ(TM) points for EA if they appeal to the far left crowd (ie, generally the journalists)

A mess, as usual.
Oh one last thing, worst of all really.

1 game, getting bad sales numbers impacting the company this much? Someone needs to re-evaluate their budgeting!

Re:Who would have thunk?

[Ashthon]

Not having played the game, a historical representation of "Operation Gunnerside" would have been a poor match for Battlefield. No shots fired, no Germans killed. Just patience, a bit of stealth and coming in and leaving over the mountains in wintertime.

What they should have done is to chose a different incident around which to base the campaign. Instead they chose to rewrite history and make it so a mother and daughter team completed the mission. Rewriting history in this way is not only extremely disrespectful to the Norwegian commands who risked their lives, but also highly sinister. It tends to be the most evil people who rewrite history to push an agenda, and they do it because they believe their cause is right and just. Such people tend to be very dangerous because they believe anything is acceptable if done for the right reasons. This isn't something to be taken lightly and must be called out before they start taking more radical steps. Historical revisionism is already pretty radical and it's important to call it out whenever anyone tries to use it as a tool to push their agenda.

Women being part of it is the least of the problems in a BF V representation... so why so much hate on that point?

There are a great many things wrong here:

1) When you're selling a product you determine who your customer is and tailor the product to meet the needs of that customer. What EA/DICE did was to tailor their product to meed the needs of people who aren't their customers and who aren't going to buy the game. It's like the author of a female romance novel inserting some action scenes to try to appeal more to men. Men still aren't going to buy their romance novel, and all it will achieve is to ruin the book for the women who will buy it.

2) When I play a game I want to have fun, not feel like I'm watching some heavy-handed propaganda. Yet in Battlefield V the propaganda was clearly the focus and the game took a back seat. The heavy-handed propaganda distracts massively from the game and prevents players from enjoying it.

3) Patrick Soderlund called gamers "uneducated" for objecting to their of rewriting of history. Insulting your customers tends to go down poorly, particularly when the customers were actually right.

4) At the launch event they continued to ridicule their customers, showing quotes complaining about how they were rewriting history. It's a provable fact that they rewrote the history of Operation Gunnerside, yet EA/DICE keep pointing the finger customers and telling them they're stupid. This isn't the way to sell a product and is obviously going to generate hostility.

Re:DICE is the real problem

[angel'o'sphere]

In ancient history between roughly 600 and 1000, samurai in Japan went to war as couples, as husband and wife.

It's not about the "historical accuracy"

[gotan]

... players wouldn't care about historical inaccuracies if it's due to an oversight or to benefit the game in some way. But if there is an inaccuracy willfully introduced in the game, then one may ask why. The answer in this case is: to take up the cause for diversity politics.

And that's (in my opinion) what at least some gamers dislike: buying a product that force feeds you thinly disguised political propaganda. It's like in game advertising, only with politics: If you want to get away with it at least make it unobtrusive.

But maybe the EA developers didn't want to be unobtrusive, maybe they wanted to make a blatant statement. In that case they should expect some opposition, especially on a subject as polarizing as the diversity agenda is.

So it sparked a debate and probably factored in buying decisions for those undecided after considering more important aspects, like gameplay, pricing etc.

If the game is as mediocre as seems to be the case, then maybe the developers should have put more effort in the game itself and less in the "correct" political message though.

The SJW complaints are mostly with story mode

[rsilvergun]

but you know what, only about 10% of Call of Duty players finish story mode. I couldn't find BF stats but I'm guessing it's the same (they're in the same genre and are basically the Mortal Kombat/Street Fighter of the military shooter world, discuss among yourselves which is MK and which is SF).

The sales suck because:

1. It went up against Rockstar's Red Dead. Everybody was gonna take a bath this year no matter what. It's like when a new Elder Scrolls comes out, there's only so many hours in the day and everybody is busy playing that.
2. The game's unfinished (it's missing half it's modes) so folks are playing BF1, which was $5 bucks on Origin recently. I'm guessing the last minute push to put Ray Tracing in is to blame.

There's no such thing as bad publicity. Far Cry 5 had similar controversy and managed to be the best selling Far Cry in history. Gamers will put their dislikes and politics aside if you bring a good game. But if you bring a mediocre one while they're 50 hours into a 200 Red Dead play through expect to get hosed.

On the plus side no Rockstar games in 2019 (I'm not a fan of Red Dead & GTA) so there's a ton of great games coming out. The rest of the game industry noticed a new Rockstar game and planned their releases accordingly, but that doesn't work for annual & bi-annual franchises. You can't risk your player base getting out of the habit of buying this years release. Hell, if the community should be mad it's about that crap.

Re: Who would have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is nowhere same as regular army.

My Grandma walked through Second World War with Soviet Army, as medical personnel.
She told me many stories about THE war, yet not one was about female soldier.

Re:DICE is the real problem

[Mashiki]

Strange that Mortal Kombat sold well then. The women scream a lot as you hack their limbs off and burn the skin off their faces. They are mostly wearing pretty sexy outfits too, really going after those male hormones.

Think you're talking about DOA. Mortal Kombat has had moderate sales over the last few titles.

Actually they opposed the draft for everyone.

That's why those groups supported things like white feather campaigns. That sure makes sense, for those that are historically unaware. That was a feminist attempt to label men who refused the draft, or where "on the home front" instead of the front line as cowards. You can find plenty of news articles from both WWI and WWII where feminist mobs attacked men, or instigated near riots trying to shame men, including a few high profile cases where men were on leave and/or receiving medals and they tried the same bullshit too.

Later feminists in the US tried to get it stopped by arguing that women must be drafted too, and took it all the way to the supreme court where the predominantly male judges ruled against them.

1981 is a far cry from 1917 or even Korea and Vietnam.

Re: Who would have thunk?

[OwP_Fabricated]

Please try to learn to separate the actual game mechanics from the situation it's supposed to present.

The idea is that it is at least supposed to look/feel similar to the actual thing, with the game-parts ironing over the realism bits that wouldn't be that fun (i.e. marching for hours through a field and then getting shot once and dying of sepsis, actual battlefields being miles and miles and miles of nothing, etc). The guns, uniforms, soldiers present, the equipment, the general settings are supposed to be at least mildly authentic.

There were women and people of color who fought in both world wars but for some reason they don't get a map/proper campaign setting of their own where they would have historically been present. Instead we got some lily-white blonde with a hook-hand who fought in a place where no women were recorded to have fought. The representation isn't the problem- the utter lack of effort in it is what makes it kinda pathetic to me.