EA executives blame Halo, COVID for failures of Battlefield 2042

While the game has its fans (hello!)there is no escaping the fact that in a broader context Battlefield 2042 The launch was a disaster for Electronic Arts. Fan reception was hostile, player numbers went down like stone and the company didn’t even reveal how many copies of the game were sold.

With the game on hold for three months now and things far from improving, Report for xfire He says that EA executives recently had an internal “city council” meeting where not only was the game called a “mistake”, but a number of reasons were put forward for its disastrous launch to try to chart a path out of this mess (Remember, games of this size are not allowed to die).

First, here’s the kind of acceptance you don’t see much in the industry about games of this size, even if it’s an “indoor” meeting:

Laura Miele, EA’s chief studio officer, led the discussion at Battlefield 2042 by acknowledging EA’s broader successes, past and present, but said “it’s really important to note when we’re missing out.” Mille continued, “This is certainly the case with the launch of Battlefield, which failed to meet the expectations of our players, and it is also clear that we have missed our expectations.”

Turning to the factors blamed for launch problems, Mila cites everything from the old Frostbite engine (“the version of Frostbite they were using was so old that they had to go back and update. So it was basically putting the game on a new engine”) to the pandemic. (“…add a global epidemic midway into the project, where game teams had to work from home, and we ended up with more new variants in development than ever before”) to the bug count (which was in the “historic levels of the game”). dice”).

One last and very funny reason Mielle cites is Halo: infinitethe game is not Battlefield 2042which appeared around the same time and apparently created a comparison among fans of multiplayer shooter games that “was not favorable because infinite aura It was a very polished title Battlefield 2042 They contained errors and weren’t polished.”

Some of these factors, such as the epidemic, are completely understandable! Others, like the Frostbite engine problems, I have less sympathy for because it’s EA’s own engine. and breeding HelloAnd A game that has its own problemsIt’s just so funny.

What’s interesting here is to see an EA executive provide this helpful list of things to blame for the game’s unsuccessful launch, and none of these things include EA executives. Sure, it’s all brought up (apart from Hello) was a factor in the game’s mixing, undercooking, or buggy, but the decision to go ahead and release the game in late 2021 regardless of not being made by the people who made it, was made by the people who sell it.

If internally blamed, surely those who insisted on releasing him in this state, rather than delaying and trying to fix/improve things, deserve their fair share too?

the full report on xfire has moreincluding things about fake reviews scores and the need for network scaling when soliciting player feedback mid-development.