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.
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.
Catering to the perpetually offended instead of your loyal gamer fanbase did not work out for you, EA? How surprising.
... and practices are coming back at them."
FTFY
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
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.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
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.
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.
" 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.
Come on, DICE can make awesome games. Take Pinball Fantasies for example. The problem is clearly EA.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
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!
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.
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!
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
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.
The, lets say. female vocalisations are barely noticeable at best.
Stop being a lying fuck.
For fuck sakes.
"His name was James Damore."
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.
Om, nomnomnom...
BF5 pandered to SJWs, FC5 pissed off SJWs. That's the difference.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
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".
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM