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:Who would have thunk?

[serviscope_minor]

Social Justice Warrior in action. You could have quoted Italy, Greece, Yugoslav and Soviet women, who actually were fighting in large numbers. Instead, being properly deranged by social justice ideology and made utterly ignorant of reality by it, you literally quoted the one resistance force that had but a token amount of women combatants.

So what you're saying is the GP's point is absolutely 100% correct it's just that he got the country wrong. Apparently that maked him some sort of deranged SJW?

And you wonder why no one takes you seriously.

Re: Who would have thunk?

[AmiMoJo]

Who are the perpetually offended ones here? The ones who got upset because the trailer had a woman in it and on that basis decided the game was shit before even playing it?

Surely if it's a fun game the fact that you are able to select a woman as your avatar is irrelevant. For people who claim not to care and only want good games that's a rather strange complaint. It's not even historically inaccurate, plenty of women fought in WW2.

Re:Who would have thunk?

[AmiMoJo]

Rather than speculate why not look at the actual game and what reviewers are saying about it?

The biggest issues are the DLC and the fact that buying the game gets you a shell that you have to pour more money into. Generic gameplay, lack of interesting multiplayer modes in a fairly saturated market... Nothing to do with the fact that you can have a female avatar.

Re: Who would have thunk?

[Mashiki]

No one called you a "alt-right russian bot nazi".

They probably should have added 'incel' in there, because that's just the go-to responses from progressives that aren't gamers. It's also a favorite of sites like Polygon and Kotaku to label anyone who's outside of their clique, and sites like Mic, Vox, and The Root. Along with the various game journo's and progressive writers that belong to the same circle of drain circling "journalism" and I use that in the loosest possible sense.

I called you a snowflake because you get upset over trivial stuff and imagined victimhood.

Well if someone is pissing around in their hobby, aren't involved, and are ruining it. That's not imagined victimhood.