It seems that barely a day goes by without news about mass layoffs in AI or gaming companies, and today the talk is about Electronic Arts. The Battlefield series publisher is axing an undetermined number of jobs across studios related to the franchise. The cuts affect key developer Dice as well as Criterion, Ripple Effect, and Motive.
Napkin math says that at $70 a pop, that works out to a cool $1.4 billion in revenue, not considering discount and regional pricing. However, EA's earnings are usually 60 to 70% for DLC versus base games. If Battlefield 6 follows the same rule of thumb, a broad guesstimate would pin total revenue at around $4 billion. Even half that amount is an impressive figure. Of course, there platform fees, discounts, and regional pricing to take into account, but it's hard to call Battlefield 6 anything but a success — EA sold 7 million units within the first three days of release, and the title was the best-selling game release of last year.
Article continues belowThe company did reportedly spend $400 million on development costs alone. Considering that publishers of big AAA launches can spend as much money marketing the game as they do making it, EA's total outlay may well have reached close to $800m.
Perhaps more tellingly, the company seemingly had lofty hopes for the player count, with one dev citing a broad goal of 100 million players across an unspecified span of time. Given that Fortnite's hovering between 30 and 60 million players a month and Counter-Strike 2 is at 30-odd million, EA's expectations may have been a bit far-fetched.
Those figures, however, never materialized, to put it mildly. The title had a spectacular launch cycle with 7 million copies sold in just three days, and Steam's player counter showed a tally of about 747,000 players at its peak, but lost over 90% of its players in just six months, and is now ranked only #34 in the Steam player count charts, behind comparatively ancient games like CS:GO, Team Fortress 2, Stardew Valley, Geometry Dash, and Euro Truck Simulator 2. Even the launch of RedSec, Battlefield 6's free-to-play battle royale mode, doesn't seem to be converting free to paid players at a significant rate.
There are many reasons for the dwindling player count, some of which I can attest to as a series veteran since Battlefield 2. The open beta showed strong promise, with players lauding the game's gunplay, movement options, destructible environments, and technical performance. The game's lean toward small maps, short time-to-kill, and fast-paced movement drew skepticism as they seemed to take more than a page from the Call of Duty formula, but the overall impression was excellent.
Although the beta didn't show off a lot of core Battlefield gameplay with vehicle interplay and large maps, players had an implicit expectation that these would be introduced and/or tweaked as the game launched. That did not happen, and instead players got the RedSec battle royale mode, season passes, skins, and microtransactions. Adding insult to injury, the rare patches seemed to introduce more issues than they fixed, namely but not only around the netcode and vehicle balance.
Predictably, there were few new maps — almost none actually large — and players soon grew weary of the constant "meat-grinder" combat, with many expressing feelings that the series had abandoned key elements that made it relatively unique in the first place. All combined, these factors resulted in general disappointment, reflected in the daily player count. Besides Steam, the game is available on the EA App, Epic, and Playstation and Xbox consoles, but the picture isn't likely to be much better there.
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