Forum Discussion

UP_Hawxxeye's avatar
UP_Hawxxeye
Legend
4 years ago

Re: Repetition of the Same Mistakes

@CyberDyme wrote:
@BFB-Praetorian wrote:
@cso7777I'm not sure dying is quite right.

BF1 sold around 23 million copies worldwide and propelled the Battlefield franchise into a new level of consumer awareness.

Admittedly V was a bit of a disaster, but even that game managed to sell as many copies as BF4 on its opening weekend and still somehow maintains a healthy enough player base (at least on PS).
BFV may not be a great Battlefield for me personally, but it's still by far the best combined arms, large scale shooter currently on the market. That's the niche that Dice have filled and no other franchise has even come close to challenging it in my opinion.

I wasn't a huge fan of the Beta myself but we definitely need to try the full game and especially Portal before we rule 2042 out.

Let there be no mistake, the core reason for the initial BF1 success was coming on the back of the huge success that BF4 was longer term!

While already 12-18 mths after BF1 launch, that initial glimmer had already faded away and the BF4 player count was above the by then the rapid decline in player count still active on BF1...

Here btw statements from EA leadership on the commercial failures that both BF1 and BFV were, as Battlefield V sold fewer than half the physical copies that Battlefield 1 did upon its launch during the same period of time.  The game sold 7.3 million copies by the end of 2018. On February 5, 2019, EA's CEO Andrew Wilson announced that the game ultimately failed to meet sales expectations, blaming the game's marketing as well as their focus on developing a single-player campaign instead of a battle royale mode, a genre which had gained recent widespread popularity. Wilson also highlighted Battlefield V's long development cycle, and release in a month of strong competition. EA's stock prices also faced its worst drop in more than a decade during its third quarter of the fiscal year, declining by around 18 percent, which EA attributed in part to the poor sales of the game.

This also helps to understand why so much effort was put into the R&D team to make a BF BattleRoyal game from EA and why we see so much of that penetrating various aspects of the BF2042 game design we see today in the Beta  (as focused on also in another thread we have ongoing on our forum here...)

People forget how at the time of BF1, the competitor was CoD infinite warfare. That CoD game failed so much on its reveal compared to BF1 that it became an entire meme of CoD bad BF1 good. This brought a metric ton of new players into BF1 who were CoD refuges.

BF1 succeed massively at the part where BFV failed massively. Marketing

2 Replies

  • Fringerunner's avatar
    Fringerunner
    Seasoned Ace
    4 years ago
    @UP_Hawxxeye In fairness, BF5 failed on a lot more levels than marketing. While it wasn't the trainwreck that was battlefront, it was probably closer to battlefront 2 in how things went from launch to "fixed state".

    I personally think the obsession with trying to leech players away from CoD/other franchises has hurt the BF franchise more over time than any competition, simply due to the fact that the more they tried to tempt players from other franchises, the more they left what made the BF3/4 combo so successful.

    BF4 was probably the first one (people tend to forget the "this feels a little too much like CoD" complaints when we went from 3 to 4 and just say 1 was the first culprit, it really wasn't), and i personally think the success of 4 decided their approach *despite* that BF4 probably owed a lot of it's success coming off BF3 which really set a high bar for content and "fun" gameplay.

    The marketing went into overdrive for 1/5/battlefront and the more they hyped things up, the less actual content we seemed to end up with (look at the DLC/premium content over the lifespan of 3 and 4 vs 1 and then later 5, also how the introduced new game modes and appealed to different playstyles between those titles).

    So i'm clear, i have zero issues with them throwing in game modes that might be popular at the time or the inclusion of HZ in BF2042, i personally think though that the main "problem" they've had since 4 is more and more tinkering with the core of what made the game(s) successful, and not doing what they did in 3/4, which was take experimental game modes and make them separate DLC/tack-on game modes while keeping the core game modes "logical" incremental upgrades, instead of dumping all those new ideas into the core game right away.
    (or in the case of 5, include a FOMO weekly/monthly grind that just reeked of "suddenly, i'm logging in to meet goals rather than playing for fun with goals dealt with when i see fit")

    Much like battlefront, by the time they'd fixed or tweaked things to a "tolerable" level (subjective obviously) they'd already lost a good chunk of the playerbase.

    Right now it seems portal is the fix for the problems described above, but the issue i see (subjective of course) is that it will keep the cascading problem they've had since 1 going, namely that instead of keeping BF the foundation and putting major changes as optional content, they're doing it backwards and hence, perception (fair or not) will end up with "here we go again, never mind, i'll play something else" rather than wait until they may or may not "fix" it to the level those looking for a more standard BF experience are looking for.

    Customer numbers and player retention will decide as always in any case, but i do find it interesting that it seems like they keep doubling down on the things that made 1 and 5 relatively "unsuccessful" (if you can say that about anything that sells 7m+ copies) while trying to find or even improve the success and player retention of 4.

    In that sense, the OP header is entirely correct at least.
    Again though, one opinion of many, but that's how i see it.
    And not a critique of BF2042 in itself, just a take on "why didn't 1 and 5 retain players like 3/4 did".
  • lzilchetl's avatar
    lzilchetl
    Seasoned Ace
    4 years ago
    @Fringerunner wrote:
    @UP_HawxxeyeIn fairness, BF5 failed on a lot more levels than marketing. While it wasn't the trainwreck that was battlefront, it was probably closer to battlefront 2 in how things went from launch to "fixed state".
    etc

    The most objective, level headed and accurate assessment read  to date. A great post.

     

    Really like the fact you bring BF3 into the debate. Everyone references BF4, but my memory is of a really lumpy launch and moved things on little from BF3. BF3 was (literally) a game changer and (as you say) raised the bar. We'd never seen anything like it. We'd all been playing BC2 when it launched (and as popular as BC2 was) BF3 felt like the ultimate FPS. A step change.

     

    And I guess I am looking for that feeling of stepping forward with BF2042. If Dice haven't learnt from BF1 (understanding the context @CyberDyme  described) and the drift away from what the game is about with BFV (and the resulting loss of revenue) then Dice aren't who I thought they were. They should have rallied and recreated that true contribution to advancing the genre in the same way BF3 did. Lets face it, If we learn from our mistakes, Dice should be quids-in.

     

    (for the record, I thought that BF1 was the most atmospheric and beautiful game ever produced, but I never got on with it... I want bombers and guns with lots of loadout options, I wanna do the maths and  earn my options for tailoring my loadouts)

     

    I'll still play, and enjoy 2042, But if the Beta is indicative, its not the game I thought it might be.

Featured Places

Recent Discussions