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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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.

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.

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.

Re:Far Cry 5 had similar controversy

[Shadow of Eternity]

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