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

Who would have thunk?

[Kohlrabi82]

Catering to the perpetually offended instead of your loyal gamer fanbase did not work out for you, EA? How surprising.

Re:Who would have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, you know... it's just not a very good game. Couldn't have anything to do with it, though, no - it's just those SJWs getting their just desserts! Of course!

Re: Who would have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you know... life is more complicated than that and for a variety reasons such as being a shitty game or bf3/4 being meh or the dumb ass sjw crap the consumer made a decision not to consume.

But no, it has to be black n white and only for the one reason that matches your world view. Right.

Be a dear, wipe your face, wash your hands and set the table for dinner.

Re:Who would have thunk?

[Rockoon]

It may not be a good game because of catering to the perpetually offended.

There is one fact I know: If you cater to the people that arent your customers at the expense of your customers, then you will absolutely lose customers, and the people you catered to will move on to fuck with something else.

Re:Who would have thunk?

[Mashiki]

Or, you know... it's just not a very good game. Couldn't have anything to do with it, though, no - it's just those SJWs getting their just desserts! Of course!

No, they went out and catered to the SJW's then told people that "if they didn't like the agenda. To not buy it." So it looks like people didn't buy it. Then the guy who pushed it "left" the company. No no, it wasn't telling people to fuck off that cratered sales. It was just a bad game...or a combination of it was a bad game and telling their market to fuck off.

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.

Re:Who would have thunk?

[Boronx]

Also tanks in these games form out of thin air. Does that upset you?

Re:Who would have thunk?

[Luckyo]

No, I'm saying that he's so deranged and used to rejecting observable reality, that he literally gave an example that was a lie when several examples where his statement was truth were literally in the same story.

Which is a major problem with people who hold deeply religious convictions. They are so utterly deranged, they are no longer capable of differentiating between reality and their dogma. As a result, they'll quote a complete and utter lie as if it supports their views, when truth is right there next to the lie they utter. Because they are so used to lying in the name of their ideology, they cannot differentiate between the lie and the truth.

Re:Who would have thunk?

[Ashthon]

So instead they should cater to the misogynist, historically challenged incel gamers out there?

I think you need to get a clue. Let me explain what actually happened.

EA claimed they were "telling the untold stories of WW2," but what they instead did was to rewrite history to push feminist propaganda. The game tells the story of Operation Gunnerside in which a team of Norwegian commandos destroy a Nazi heavy water production facility. However, in the game EA/DICE have written the Norwegian commandos out of history. Instead, the team who destroy the Nazi facility is a strong, empowered, educated mother and daughter team, who are not only scientists but unstoppable soldiers who can physically overpower any man. Clearly, this isn't "telling the untold stories of WW2," but rewriting history to push an agenda. There's a video here which shows the game scenario and then explains what actually happened during WW2. It's quite long, but you only need to watch the first five minutes and you'll get the point.

The whole game was a work of propaganda, designed not to appeal to gamers, but to force feminist propaganda on players. Then, despite completely rewriting history, they told gamers they were "uneducated" and said, "if you don't like it, don't buy it," which is why so few people bought the game.

But hey, don't let reality get in your way. Just keep claiming it's all the fault of "historically challenged incel gamers." Moron.

Re:Who would have thunk?

[teg]

So instead they should cater to the misogynist, historically challenged incel gamers out there?

I think you need to get a clue. Let me explain what actually happened.

EA claimed they were "telling the untold stories of WW2," but what they instead did was to rewrite history to push feminist propaganda. The game tells the story of Operation Gunnerside in which a team of Norwegian commandos destroy a Nazi heavy water production facility. However, in the game EA/DICE have written the Norwegian commandos out of history. Instead, the team who destroy the Nazi facility is a strong, empowered, educated mother and daughter team, who are not only scientists but unstoppable soldiers who can physically overpower any man. Clearly, this isn't "telling the untold stories of WW2," but rewriting history to push an agenda. There's a video here which shows the game scenario and then explains what actually happened during WW2. It's quite long, but you only need to watch the first five minutes and you'll get the point.

The whole game was a work of propaganda, designed not to appeal to gamers, but to force feminist propaganda on players. Then, despite completely rewriting history, they told gamers they were "uneducated" and said, "if you don't like it, don't buy it," which is why so few people bought the game.

But hey, don't let reality get in your way. Just keep claiming it's all the fault of "historically challenged incel gamers." Moron.

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

Re:Who would have thunk?

[stealth_finger]

Can you tell me how many black females with amputations and prosthesis were fighting in WWII on the front lines?

Can you tell me how many made it into the final game? Oh yeah, zero. That shit was cut fast but you wouldn't be able to tell from all the people seemingly still frothing at the mouth over it.

Re: Who would have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

huehuehue orange man bad

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:Who would have thunk?

[NettiWelho]

Can you tell me how many made it into the final game? Oh yeah, zero. That shit was cut fast but you wouldn't be able to tell from all the people seemingly still frothing at the mouth over it.

Why should any of us buy a game made by literal racists to verify their racism? Just look at this image originally published by DICE developer: "WHITE MEN! WHITE MEN! WHITE MEN! (top left corner of screen)" The image is unaltered.

That along with this is a dealbreaker.

The responsibility is on the developer and publisher to communicate clearly. They dropped the ball big time on this.

Re: Who would have thunk?

[RedK]

Who are the perpetually offended ones here?

It's a WWII game. Why the heck would it have women soldiers with cybernetic prosthetics in it ?

The offended ones are the ones complaining every video game needs a token character of every race and gender (all 10,000 of them) in them. The same ones who made it so we now have unskippable disclaimers that says "This game was developed by a diverse team of different genders, religions and sexualities" as if that matters at all. What happened to just listing the names of the team in the credits ?

People wouldn't make a fuss about all this crap being added to video games, if there wasn't a bunch of offended people forcing companies to add it in the first place. It's not like firing up a text editor and compiling code is something only men can do. If women or minorities or whatever want to make games, they can. Co-opting established properties instead of making their own is the issue here.

Re:Who would have thunk?

[Mashiki]

Thanks for `splainin that. I hope your legs were the maximum distance apart as you typed that.

From Ford, GM, Chrysler, and AMC pulling a "fuck you plebs, you'll buy what we make" in the 1970's, to New Coke, to movie studios attacking their audience when a movie flops hard today, their point is right.

Of course, it takes a special kind of sexist to make a comment like that in the first place.

Re: Who would have thunk?

[Shadow of Eternity]

Right because there's absolutely no difference between things that literally make this a playable videogame and politicized sexist racist tokenism shoved in people's faces followed by attacks that if you don't adore it you're an alt-right russian bot nazi.

You realise that well over 80% of the population is outright sick or your shit, right? Particularly the very minorities that you, the single most homogenously rich and white group in the US, insist you speak for.

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.

Re: Who would have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to include women in a WW2 game then show them where they really fought, in the Soviet army. In the red army women were tankers, snipers, pilots just about everything really. Other WW2 games depicted this and it wasn't an issue. Why? because its accurate.

Re: Who would have thunk?

[RedK]

and where the objectives have nothing to do with actual historical events

Why are you lying ?

Your first 2 elements are game mechanics, while we're discussing design and narrative concepts. Mixing up the 2 is dishonest.

But this last one, where the heck do you get off literally lying. The story of BF V's single player campaign *IS* a historical event. They way they portray it is ahistorical though, because instead of actually telling you how the Norwegians dealt with the Nazi heavy water plant, they made up a Mother/daughter mary sue scenario.

That *IS* part of the issue with BF V's entire design : it's ahistorical. If you wanted to play a Fantasy War game, there are a metric ton of those that exist. There's even one about a little girl that tames huge dinosaurs and it's pretty great (Horizon Dawn). The point is BFV is a WWII game. Not a "Fantasy War" game.

Re: Who would have thunk?

[Pyramid]

Yeah, it's only the "right wing" that oversimplifies things.

Careful, your bias might be showing.

Re:Who would have thunk?

[asylumx]

Seriously! I don't get when people complain about insignificant crap like this because it's "not realistic" while they're playing a game where you can not only survive getting shot in the head, you can even keep fighting. BF5 lets you change your character (and they don't charge for new characters), so if you don't like the one you started with JUST CHANGE IT. The game has enough real problems, like how it crashes every other round. We don't need to be manufacturing social problems.

Re:Who would have thunk?

[mjwx]

Or, you know... it's just not a very good game. Couldn't have anything to do with it, though, no - it's just those SJWs getting their just desserts! Of course!

I found that out after Battlefield 3. The gameplay had been removed and replaced with a grind system that ensured as long as you played for long enough you got the upgrades to make you unstoppable. It stopped being a game where skill mattered and all you needed to do was suck long enough to unlock the upgrades.

But facts won't stop the morons bleating "SJW".

Re: Who would have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, horseshit.

The number of BF gamers who actually care about whether it is a realistic WWII environment is small.
The number willing to pile on and complain about SJW stuff is large.
The number willing to pile on and complain just for the luls is large.

Why isn't BF5 selling well? EA has sucked for a long time. The game is fairly generic. There are LOTS of games to choose from and dropping $60+ on everything isn't possible for a lot of people.

I bought it. Maybe played 4 hours so far because it isn't that great.
Wasn't at all traumatized by characters that are female...because I'm not a child.

Re:Who would have thunk?

[mjwx]

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.

Can you show me how many soldiers in WWII respawned? because that's the message EA was trying to push with BF V...

Battlefield was never about reality, reality makes for really crap gameplay (most historical battles are so lopsided that any recreation will always end in the same result, forcing one team to always lose does not make for a fun game).

The problem with BF 5 is that it's a shit game, gameplay wise. the Battlefield series has been since BF 3 (the BF game that made me abandon the series). The problem all the whiners shouting "SJW" have is an inferiority complex, the notion that somewhere someone you consider inferior is being treated as your equal. That is completely different and almost totally unrelated to the problem EA is encountering with BF 5. Battlefield is about multiplayer gameplay, had they got that right no-one would care. No-one buys a Battlefield game for it's story, the original Battlefield 1942 didn't even have a single player campaign (I believe that was added in BF 3). Ultimately the game is floundering because the gameplay is crap and everyone is finally realising it.

Re: Who would have thunk?

[RedK]

imagined victimhood.

"This game doesn't cater to my particular sexual preferences and state of being even though it has nothing to do with sexual preferences or states of being" = imagined victimhood

"We changed the game to pander to this group's particular sexual preferences,at the detriment of design elements that drew in our target audience, completely changing the game for the worse" = actual "victimhood" (aka, actual reason to dislike what is happening, not "victimhood", no one is pretending they're EA's victims here).

Why is it always about being a "victim" with folks on your side ? You can dislike things and events without being a frickin' victim.

Re:Who would have thunk?

[Ol Olsoc]

It may not be a good game because of catering to the perpetually offended. There is one fact I know: If you cater to the people that aren't your customers at the expense of your customers, then you will absolutely lose customers, and the people you catered to will move on to fuck with something else.

This has been learned the hard way in more than just EA's case. The destruction of the Star Wars golden goose by Kennedy and Johnson. Especially when they not only refused criticism, they attacked and ridiculed anyone who disagreed with them.

How'd that work out?

In the world of entertainment, it is pretty important that you produce entertainment that your customers want.

And if you produce a game based on a event like WW2, it needs to be accurate, because the customer is pretty well versed.

And yeah - an alternative universe WW2 game could be made. And as long as it's known as an alternative game, its all good.

But speaking to that - you get interesting things when you cater to those people. The latest Wonder Woman movie which did indeed have a war setting, which did indeed have social Justice oversight - still outraged some of the easily offended.

They were outraged that Gal Gadot raised her arm - and horrors!!! To Twitter and scream!! Wonder Woman Gal Gadot had no armpit hair!! https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/...

What is worse, Wonder woman as a member of an immortal race of only women could not give true consent, therefore she was raped!!! https://slate.com/human-intere...

The point is good people, if you are dealing with a group who cannot be satisfied, there is no point in dealing with them at all.

Re:Who would have thunk?

[RedK]

Game mechanics vs design.

Spawning tanks materializing out of thin air = Game mechanic.
Women with Cyborg arms that single handedly took down a Nazi heavy water plant = Design element that contradicts the historical setting.

One is required for gameplay, the other is pandering. Not a hard concept, except for ideologues trying to pretend this shit is normal and acceptable. It has nothing to do with "wahmen in games". Some of the best games feature women protagonists. It has to do with shipping a WWII era historical shooter literred with non-game mechanics anachronisms.

Re:Who would have thunk?

[Z80a]

The problem is not catering for em, its hiring em.
Because as soon they're in, they will get offended by everyone with talent in the studio and try their best to get em fired and replaced by more people of the same religion.

Re: Who would have thunk?

[Nidi62]

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.

I've read monographs and firsthand accounts from Wehrmacht soldiers(if you are interested in the subject Eastern Inferno by Hans Roth is incredible about the Eastern Front that specifically mention female combatants multiple times. One particular one that stood out is about a tank with a husband/wife crew where the wife, after the husband was killed, continued to fight on with her tank. Another was Red Army medics defending a bunker with hand grenades and female soldiers found dead next to anti-air emplacements. Then there are the mobilized workers at places like Stalingrad, a female foreman leading her workers into battle was explicitly mentioned. Sounds like your Grandmother was a nurse and most likely served behind the front lines and later in the war when Germany was on the retreat. I am sure she went through a lot and had some incredible stories, but women fighting on the frontlines is an established fact.

Re:Who would have thunk?

[CronoCloud]

Putting female avatars to play in a game is an "agenda"?

It's an unrealistic game! It's never been historically accurate. Does having women in the game bother you that much? If you don't want to play a woman, don't. But wouldn't it be nice to have female avatars for those who DO?

Re: Who would have thunk?

[HornWumpus]

Movies show comic book history.

They also don't show the Ruskys and the Germans as _allies_ invading and splitting four nations at the start of the war.

"EA's shitty business policies ...

[Qbertino]

... and practices are coming back at them."

FTFY

Nvidia's problem...

[jools33]

Nvidia's problem wasn't the tie in with Battlefield, more so the pricing, if you decide to add 30% to the price, expect sales to not be quite so hot.

Re:Nvidia's problem...

[Luckyo]

If anything, nvidia got used to the cryptoboom pricing. It almost seems like people up top the company convinced themselves that those prices were the new normal.

And this has been a harsh wake up call. They price RTX cards as if they're the hottest cryptomining kit that gamers would have to compete with miners for, as happened with many of the GTX series cards.

Re:Nvidia's problem...

[Luckyo]

2060 is not a mid end card. The only people who claim it is are marketing people working for nvidia. It is priced like the sweet spot cryptomining kit that was 1060 6GB mid end card when cryptomining craze was at its peak and those cards commanded 50-75% price premium over MSRP, as 1060 was being sold at x70 high end prices.

2060 is being sold at approximately x70 card price point in the past, the nvidia's high end model throughout many generations. Ergo, it's a high end card. Mid end is in the 200USD MSRP range, topping out at around 250. It is by far the most sold segment in discreet cards in terms of volume. It is where 1060, 960, 760 etc were at launch.

Now whether nvidia is doing this because their top brass bought their own cool aid and think they can make cryptoboom prices the new normal, or their well documented catastrophic situation with warehouses full of unsold 1060 chips that board partners had to return because after cryptoboom crashed, no one wanted to buy them is anyone's guess. My guess is that it's a mix of both. But none of it makes 2060 a mid end segment card. It's a high end card, replacing 1070. 1060, the actual mid end card in nvidia's portfolio doesn't have a 20x0 model equivalent (yet?). My guess, one isn't coming until they finally manage to sell as many of the warehoused 1060s left over from the cryptoboom production peak, which is likely to take a while, as no one in the production and retail chain is willing to take a massive hit from selling them at much lower margins than was reported to their shareholders, or perhaps even at loss.

DICE is the real problem

[Anonymous Coward]

EA bought DICE, the scandanavian ENGINE company, back when it seemed their work was good. The EA turned over most of their other IPs to this increasingly awful engine. Worse, being scandanavian, DICE is sjw to the power infinity.

Anyway EA combined the complete lack of game play design skills exhibited by DICE (DICE's Mirror's Edge 2 was a critical and technical disaster) with the whole lootbox/microtransaction 'gaming as a service' nonsense to create a perfect storm of fail.

BF V, initially stripped of lootboxes after the pervious year's Star Wars Battlefront debacle, had to lean 100% on the SJW 'strategy' which boils down to calling your core playerbase 'racist' and/or 'sexist' scumbgas that the company sincerely hopes will not purchase their products.

Well Battlefield has also been significantly dumbed down since the first, and the last good one was BF2 (or Bad Company 2). In chasing the stoned/drunk couch potato console casual market, gameplay has to boil down to the worst kind of 'pew, pew- you're dead' dribble.

This at a time where thanks to Indy and Steam, good gaming has never been more diverse. It's just the AAA crap from Bethesda, Ubisoft, Activision and EA that is this lootbox casual brainless cr-p now entirely marketed at dribblers. See Fallout 76 for an even worse example.

But as I said, DICE is at the heart of all of this. As a company of programmers who cannot program or ever create new gameplay mechanisms, they fixate on the things they can achieve. Games that use photogammatry rather than excellence in engine work. Games that focus on microtransaction mechanisms. A complete loss of quality.

Whaty killed BF V's sales was SJW sh-it in place of good game design, rather than SJW sh-t ALONGSIDE good game design. And having the voice of women screeching and screaming as they kill and die in every online game was a psychological idiocy beyond words.

Fortnite is all SJW, with no impact on usage cos the game is perceived as excellent by the audience that plays it. Nothing DICE has done in many many years comes close to good, let alone excellent. And DICE infects 90% of current EA- even the new Titanfall 3 may be on their sh-it engine.

The mantra- make good games- would fix the current woes of these publishers. But they are doubling down on 'gaming as a service' instead.

Re:DICE is the real problem

[Kokuyo]

" And having the voice of women screeching and screaming as they kill and die in every online game was a psychological idiocy beyond words."

No shit!

Men are hardcoded to want to protect females. SJWs think that's a bad thing because this is triggered more the more feminine a female is. The war against femininity and beauty is very openly fought among those people...

And then you want to sell a game that is primarily directed at males (because females aren't interested in war... even the suffragettes were fighting for a right to vote for females without being under threat of a draft... women are not dumb enough to want to go to war) and fill it up with deus ex machina female characters who can do all that men can even though they have way less muscle mass that is way less efficient than men's.

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?!

The worst and most blatant sign of total incompetence is the way they portrayed females in wars. There have been many examples of tried and true female war heroes. There was no need to embellish (and implying that women need embellishment to have a place in the scenario).

I don't know about the US, but god damn it, the French Resistance was full of women, wasn't it? What about Russian sharpshooters and nightwitches?

It is not hard to find examples of capable women in war. They are so easy to find, in fact, that there are memes about them! To not work with that is either an unrealistic amount of stupidity or done on purpose.

Re:DICE is the real problem

[dunkelfalke]

Come on, DICE can make awesome games. Take Pinball Fantasies for example. The problem is clearly EA.

Re:DICE is the real problem

[Rockoon]

The, lets say. female vocalisations are barely noticeable at best.

Stop being a lying fuck.

For fuck sakes.

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.

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.

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.

Re:This is Patrick Soderlund fault

[NettiWelho]

a woman with disabilities

The lady in trailer is not disabled, thats not a prosthethic as WW2 era prosthethics can't do things like reload a bolt-action rifle, machine gun or artillery piece.

That lady is cybernetically enhanced . Too bad its not a cyberpunk game.

Religion is more important than money

[Jarwulf]

It doesn't make sense on the surface. Its not like purple haired womyn's studies majors are a sizable demographic for FPSs. Its bizarre how so many companies like outdoors stores, comics, and gaming that are do not have SJWs anywhere near their target audience are so obsessed with currying their favor that they're willing to lose out on billions and antagonize their actual core audience. Then you realize this is a religious ideology to them. Theres now a sizable number of people in power who hold the philosophy..or religion of 'social justice' as strongly as the most zealous priest or mullah. They don't care about losing money anymore. They are completely unrepentant the usual corporate spin apology is now replaced with the company continuing to double down on blaming the fans. All that matters is spreading and putting the ideology into power. Looks like we've finally found the one thing corporations appear to love more than money and it seems to be bowing down in worship of SJWism.

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:"BF3 and BF4 were not great from a gameplay..."

[Jarwulf]

Those "perpetually offended" that people are talking about aren't the "real gamers".

Who went after Rimworld? Who went after Doom Eternal? Who went after Cyberpunk's twitter for a joke tweet they made?

Real gamers don't get offended by these kinds of cosmetics. We are in it for the fun and the gameplay.

Its not about just this one incident but the trend of a vocal minority of activists. (Yes the proportion of people who want gender balanced armies for the sake of inclusiveness are still a minority among gaming audiences.) pursuing men into every hobby he takes refuge in and despoiling it with their neurosis. Its not enough for you to rule over us during work. You want to rule over our play too. Since we should all be good humored why not make a movie about MLK where you turn him into a white man or take a beloved historical female figure and make her into a man?

The "perpetually offended" are the basement dwelling internet trolls that just wants to destroy something for the lulz. They are mad about some game grabbing attention of a part of the player base and not playing their favorite shitty game.

Kinda like how activists destroyed the previous creative landscape and now 80% of female protagonists and growing in the arts are variations of the asexual androgynous Rey archetype? Or how they launch a media inquisition against every game that has females that are considered 'too sexy' especially if the character does not have enough masculinity to counter this. Female characters must conform to this narrow behavioural pattern or be unremarkable or they'll be targeted ie DOA, Dragon's Crown, etc. Its gotten to the point that games with major women outside these approved archetypes are now very rare outside of Japanese studios. And this is just the craziness related to feminism.

Re:1942

[stealth_finger]

1942, Vietnam (also known as bfv), 2, 2142, Bad Co, 1943, Bad Co 2, 3, 4, Hardline, 1, V

That's how you number a series!

I'm baffled

[Anonymous Coward]

I really can't understand how people don't understand that getting woke is what got EA broke. I mean, if nothing else, they are the masters of rehashing old content and making it profitable. Look at FIFA. People buy this shit every single freaking year, paying full price for literally the same game with refreshed teams. Something that a patch should've done. Imagine if FIFA team adds mixed gender teams. Imagine for a second that FIFA 2020 has Real Madrid with both males and females and tell me if that game would sell like a hotcake or it would flop.

This is what happened to Battlefield V. It could've easily reached the sales numbers of 3/4 or 1. But it didn't. Nowhere near close, and it's not because the game is not vastly different from Bf1.

They'll probably recover and get those stock numbers up again with successful Anthem, it's their best people working on it. Bunch more FIFA releases and the shitshow that FUT is. But I hope they take this as a wake-up call. The same that the likes of Activision/Blizzard are taking right now, and they better start focusing on their core audience, or yet another game crash is coming upon us.

Gaming can be the highest grossing form of entertainment, but it has to be done right. Look at Red Dead Redemption, or hell, the latest God of War. They didn't spend their time dealing with political correctness bull*, they targetted their core audience that keeps those titles in borderline religion sense, and it paid. Those 2 are the highest grossing games of 2018, if not all time. RDR at least is. And GoW is a platform exclusive, so a lot of gamers simply couldn't play it on their platform of choice. And it still sold freaking well.

Historical authenticity got me

[DrXym]

I don't believe that people didn't buy the game because people can choose a race / gender in multiplayer. More likely they didn't buy because the game feels stale and the ongoing belief that EA would rape players the way they had in the past.

It wouldn't hurt if companies like EA, Activision et al suffered a backlash and financial shock for acting like greedy jerks. It might remind them that they're supposed to be producing games, not skinner boxes.

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:Far Cry 5 had similar controversy

[Mashiki]

Far Cry 5 had similar controversy and ended up the best selling entry in the series. It's not the SJWs ruining things, it's the BF3 launch all over (minus the worst of the bugs).

I seem to remember the main complaints were SJWs complaining that it really wasn't a "time to shoot racists" simulator full of backwards Christians in KKK regalia(instead it being a drug-running cult), and then went out of it's way actually portray Montana as really not a racist shit hole. Montana still being partly shit is up for debate. You can find the mainstream game site complaints on that on sites like Polygon or RPS if you really want.

Re:Far Cry 5 had similar controversy

[Shadow of Eternity]

BF5 pandered to SJWs, FC5 pissed off SJWs. That's the difference.

Re:Far Cry 5 had similar controversy

[RedK]

Far Cry 5 had the absolute OPPOSITE controversy, and it's easy to see by the fact the "complaining" is coming from the people praising BFV. Namely, TheVerge, Vox, Polygon and other SJW pandering "gaming" blogs suddenly writing negative pieces about Far Cry 5 :

https://www.theverge.com/2018/...

Literally :

Ever since its reveal nearly a year ago, Far Cry 5 has invited controversy. Whereas most shooters have players aim their weapons at zombies, demons, or Nazis, Far Cry 5 takes place in Montana, and its enemies are American citizens who bear a strong resemblance to the stereotypical image of a modern, young white supremacist. The first piece of art for the game was a re-creation of The Last Supper, but with Southern hipsters wielding guns and knives and a tablecloth that was an alternate reality version of the American flag.

In the months since, the developers at Ubisoft Montreal have been hesitant to draw any true parallels between the gameâ(TM)s world and the real world. And after playing a few dozen hours of the game, the reason for their reticence is clear: Far Cry 5 doesnâ(TM)t have anything to say about race in America. It doesnâ(TM)t have much to say at all. Itâ(TM)s a big, dumb action game with an artificial sheen implying depth.

How disingenuous to you have to be to pretend both games received the same kind of "controversy".