It seems that the people behind this project aren’t completely rooting for it to succeed sometimes. The marketing team did an awful job, and I mean that in the least disrespectful way possible. The commercials for this game were enjoyable, they even got Sir Patrick Stewart for Feastivus, but they weren’t shown... anywhere. The last commercial on television was during Founders. The last video on the PvZ channel was made for Luck o’ the Zombie, and that wasn’t shown as a YouTube advertisement or a television commercial. Everybody knows about GW1 and GW2, and everyone remembers them fondly; if you come across someone who HAS heard of this game, then you’ll most likely find that they dislike it or have heard of its bad reputation.
Is it a poor management deal? Is the team too small? It can’t be burnout; the game hasn’t even been out for a year and there’s still plenty of content that’s been leaked and datamined. Supposedly they’re porting it to the Switch, which means something must be keeping the cogs going at PopCap and EA, but even that seems like a herculean task to undertake when it doesn’t even run properly on the platforms it’s already on. What happened with this game? It really got the short end of the stick in this situation.
It really is unfortunate how little this game was advertised before its release. The only reason I even heard of BFN’s development was through leaks that a “GW3” was in development since I decided to get back into GW2 early last year. At least GW1 and 2 had the benefit of being announced at E3, so even if they weren’t mainstream, they were still known and talked about...
They released BFN on the same day as announcement through a thinly veiled early access plan, which of course was Founders Edition. However, if you count the end of Founders as the true release date, then they didn’t even truly announce it. All advertisements ceased airing after Founders was over, which completely defeats the purpose of an early access to improve the game before release because nobody knew the game ever released. The game had a low playerbase because you had to actively search for the game’s existence in the first place.
The only thing leading up to BFN’s announcement was the Picnic closed alpha. The closed alpha happened a month before retail release. That alone sets up a rocky foundation for the rest of the game.
TL;DR: This game has been a marketing and communication disaster from the start, and I really wish they gave it a few more months to bake to truly let it shine.
