Yesterday Andrew Wilson said that “DICE’s decision to prioritise single player over the sequel’s unreleased Battle Royale mode may have played a part in the release’s subpar commercial situation”.
I believe this is not the reason Battlefield V’s sales are poor. When Battlefield V was announced I was excited, the gameplay looked fantastic, the trailers, a really great looking WW2 experience and after the high of Battlefield 1, what could go wrong? Everything went wrong. Firstly, the game was rushed out in 2 years, when it was released it was released with glitches and bugs and even to this day I still experience the bug of not being able to quit the game or get into the next match on the PlayStation 4. Battlefield V also released with a really small amount of maps and mostly just rehashed weapons from Battlefield 1. Sadly both maps and weapons were not memorable and they just lacked that creativity that Battlefield is known for. Game modes were missing, they were on the menu but you couldn’t do anything with them. The game was released bare bones with so much missing, Battlefield was a titan in the industry, the only online game that could give you so much freedom on how you take the objective on with 64 other players either helping you or trying to kill you.
I have so much empathy for developers under big publishers like EA, Activision and more but DICE need to at least take a bit of responsibility and speak up. I do understand shareholder pressure but other indie publishers give their developers freedom like Wired Productions, 505 Games, Team 17 and so much more. The big titans of the triple-A industry need to take an example from the little publishers who actually help the developers under them, not make them churn out rushed rubbish for a quick buck.
I could be wrong about the Battlefield V sales, after all, it’s an opinion, but I know Battlefield games and V was doomed to fail from launch after being released with such a lack of content. I’d have happily waited another year for the developers at DICE to have more time and less stress.
EA in the past already stated that they feel single player gaming is now dead (Spider-man and Kratos want a word). Is this a scapegoat so they can get out of providing single player experiences as it’s easier to monetise a multiplayer experience?
While it seems lately I have been really digging into EA’s business practices, how can I ignore the stuff they come out with? When I search for news to write it’s always EA has said this, EA has done that, it really frustrates me, they don’t have the gamers in mind at all. Like YouTuber has said on their channel, developers, publishers, they need to just make games. While I feel indies are already there, the triple-A industry isn’t.
Nerdy Bird Games 
Didn’t it also include the stupid politics with women centric missions? I’d say I know but I gave it a hard pass when the politics were obvious, didn’t look at it anymore.
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I didnt bought IT because it was SJW trash
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I didn’t buy it simply because EA told me not to on social media. They had outspoken developers on Twitter who clearly said they didn’t want people like me playing their games and not to buy them.
Myself and millions of others listened. Remember, “Get Woke, Go Broke”.
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I’m not really surprised Battlefield V didn’t do all that well in terms of sales, with many factors playing into this. Releasing broken or bare-bones games is a thing EA is well-known for over the recent years, and after the mess that was SW: Battlefront 2 with its greedy microtransactions at launch, I imagine many gamers simply decided to skip Battlefield and play something else entirely.
EA keeps saying single player games are “dead”, yet we’ve obviously been seeing a lot of high-quality AAA games find success with sales while they’ve only offered single player experiences. It isn’t a matter that gamers “don’t like single-player games”, in my opinion, it has to do more with EA’s lackluster releases for titles that offer a campaign mode. I’ve played through Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda, and enjoyed them both, but at the same time neither really grabbed me as the exciting adventures they were supposed to be. EA has really restricted its development teams in how much time they’re given to release a new project, which ultimately results in buggy or unfinished games.
In regards to their battle royale mode, I don’t think its delay is a reason for low sales volume. With a large variety of free-to-play titles in that genre (Fortnite being just absolutely huge over the last year), few would be willing to purchase a full-priced release just to play that. Sure, Battlefield players are there for the mass-scale multiplayer the series always provided, but like you’ve said, it ended up being barebones and lacking many features at launch. If they still go through with including a battle royale mode, they’ve pretty much killed its success already by having Respawn release Apex Legends that’s free to play.
EA really needs to rethink their strategies, but seems at the current moment, all they’re concerned with is monetizing every game from microtransactions. After all, their EA Ultimate Team mode is alone worth $800 million, so they’re chasing profits rather than developing quality titles. It’s been a really long time since I remember playing a great single-player game published by EA, and they’re not helping their case with cancelling some promising projects they had in development.
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I did worry about Battlefield after the Star Wars Battlefront 2 fiasco, seems I was right but I still preordered it for £50 foolishly then a week later it went down in price a lot. It just felt bare bones and instead of EA going, yeah you know what, we screwed up, we got selfish, we will try harder, it’s simply, single player games aren’t popular. Bull crap, there’s so many good single player games out there. Sadly the Battlefield Battle Royale doesn’t even sound good either, plus it’s creeping up to March and we have nothing still no details nothing.
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For sure, even in recent years we’ve seen tons of solid single player experiences. Sony especially took huge advantage of that with their first-party exclusives. And EA isn’t known to be creative unfortunately
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I don’t really see the point of BF5 battle royale at this point. Black Ops 4 already has one in the full-price release range, EA just released Apex Legends for free, and Fortnite and PUBG are still dominating the field quite a lot
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I’ll reply to all your posts here just so I don’t miss anything. I mean I’m in full agreement, BioWare had some amazing stuff in the past, absolutely stunning, I mean to me even EA was able to come out with the odd decent game in the past then it’s like greed got to them and it became more about share holders. It feels like they’re promising to much to these big guys and girls and it isn’t working out. TO succeed you gotta keep the gamer in mind and monetising these games so deeply and releasing shells is just not working. Everyone jumping onto the battle royale band wagon isn’t going to work out either, it will die down like survival games did, putting vast amounts of money into ones that people don’t show much interest in is doomed to screw them over, and when it becomes to oversaturated the player numbers are to sporadic for any company to really make a quick buck. Fortnite, pubg, Apex eventually will die down and they’ll have to figure new ways out. EA keeping s hold of the battlefield vs battle royale will hurt them and I believe they should just pull it, admit they messed up try harder. But ea will never do it.
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