Gaming News

Potential-Monke

No no, BF will have to go futuristic next, wall running, jet packs/jump boosters, specialists like in CoD, but it will be universally acclaimed because it's not CoD. Because screw CoD, or something like that.

ERG89

Varik wrote:

EA blaming bfv numbers on release date (was very full quarter) and focusing on the single player rather than battleroyal.

The single player wasn't even complete when they released it. :pac:
Pretty sure the map count was pretty sparse in numbers too.
Tbh the games are rushed out the door at DICE these days to the point they can't even keep up with their own products.
The moment it was revealed fans said nope & then EA said if you don't want it don't buy it which I guess they did

johnny_ultimate

Potential-Monke wrote: »

No no, BF will have to go futuristic next

Ahem.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlefield_2142

Varik

Stone Deaf 4evr wrote: »

If anything, it was that the game wasn't a radical enough departure from BF1. Everyone thought the WW1 setting was what they wanted, but in reality, they wanted a sequel to BF4 that wasn't the cops and robbers nonsense of hardline.

4 for me is still a near perfect game, hardline and bf1 went to far towards being twitch shooters and they bumped up the movement speed too much for my liking.

Don't think anyone was calling out for WW1, they settled.


How can you say it wasn't a "radical enough departure", when your alternative is do BF4 again (the game that was a copy paste sequel to BF3 and had it's own re-skinned mod looking sequel).

gizmo

Varik wrote: »

EA blaming bfv numbers on release date (was very full quarter) and focusing on the single player rather than battleroyal.

It'll be interesting to see the validity of those claims tested with Activision's Earning Call on the 12th if they give some more firm Black Ops 4 numbers.

So far we know that while the physical sales for the game were down considerably year-on-year, their digital numbers were also considerably higher across platforms. That's with their approach of not only departing from the WWII setting, but also the futuristic setting of Infinite War and its strongest campaign in years and selling a Multiplayer-only Battle Royale-centric title for full price with their fairly egregious examples of microtransactions.

Throwing around the whole "EA told us not to buy it" thing in light of the numbers is a bit daft too (not directed at you ERG89, it's quite widespread). It still sold 7.3m copies and was only short of their estimations by around a million units. So what was the cause of the ~14% shortfall? The dearth of content? The mediocrity? Or Soderlund's comment about not buying it because of the women in the game? :pac:

Stone Deaf 4evr

Varik wrote: »

Don't think anyone was calling out for WW1, they settled.


How can you say it wasn't a "radical enough departure", when your alternative is do BF4 again (the game that was a copy paste sequel to BF3 and had it's own re-skinned mod looking sequel).

They got caught up in the hype about going back to 'boots on the ground' , people were tired of COD taking the futuristic route, and they doubled down on it by going back to world war 1. The criticisms of bf1 - limited weapons, optics, vehicles, couldn't be addressed properly in a world war 2 setting. Hardline was a bad game from top to bottom, no one wanted panel vans , they wanted APCs, artillery and fighter jets.

SomeSayKos

I found the outrage over Battlefield V having women in it to be reeeaaaallllly creepy. Battlefield was never exactly historically accurate like. It's entertainment.....

Anyways, I'm a big battlefield fan but I didn't opt in for V this year, mostly coz I burnt out on Battlefield 1 pretty quick.

Varik

gizmo wrote: »

Throwing around the whole "EA told us not to buy it" thing in light of the numbers is a bit daft too (not directed at you ERG89, it's quite widespread). It still sold 7.3m copies and was only short of their estimations by around a million units. So what was the cause of the ~14% shortfall? The dearth of content? The mediocrity? Or Soderlund's comment about not buying it because of the women in the game? :pac:

BFV had a 30-40% sale a week after release, a 50% 2 weeks after to old BF players, and was 50% off to everyone ~2 week after that.

Doubt that the 8.3 was their original projection going into it coming off the largest selling BF game in the series. BF1 hit 10m on physical on console alone in it's first 2 months, and apparently had a 50% larger player base than anything before in the series.

Varik

SomeSayKos wrote: »

I found the outrage over Battlefield V having women in it to be reeeaaaallllly creepy. Battlefield was never exactly historically accurate like. It's entertainment.....

There were women in BF1, and no outrage. It's almost like DICE/EA wanted to dismiss all criticism and anger by painting it as such.

EoinHef

SomeSayKos wrote: »

I found the outrage over Battlefield V having women in it to be reeeaaaallllly creepy. Battlefield was never exactly historically accurate like. It's entertainment.....

Anyways, I'm a big battlefield fan but I didn't opt in for V this year, mostly coz I burnt out on Battlefield 1 pretty quick.

Well depends on whose version of the story you read. A lot people asked how does this character fit into the time period and the game. Which i thought was a reasonable question.

To which an EA exec responded by saying people were mysogonististic uneducated fools basically. That set the tone for what followed. That guy,who paid for that with his job,was all too quick to jump to conclusions that everyone who was asking the question was asking because they were ALL some sort of alt right or something.

Now obviously there would have been people asking the question that were all he described but a lot were not. Calling everyone uneducated mysogonists before even the reasonable parts of the debate could have been had is not a good start to any discourse.

Why he couldnt have just said "We feel its important to include a diverse cast in the game even if the portrayal of some character will be less historically accurate"

Nothing wrong with that.

gizmo

Varik wrote: »

BFV had a 30-40% sale a week after release, a 50% 2 weeks after to old BF players, and was 50% off to everyone ~2 week after that.

Doubt that the 8.3 was their original projection going into it coming off the largest selling BF game in the series. BF1 hit 10m on physical on console alone in it's first 2 months, and apparently had a 50% larger player base than anything before in the series.

Yup, those early sales were definitely quite telling. Activision seemed to take a different approach with the cheaper Zombie-less Battle Edition coming in early December and the free weekend in January, both of which came across as a little less overtly reactionary I guess?

Sales projection wise, they don't tend to be numbers lied about in Investor calls. I mean, if they were going to do that why not say they were above estimations and give more fluffy remarks like "When we released the Season 2 content in January, Battlefield V became the largest Battlefield game ever"? Like, largest in what way? ****ing file size?

Got a source for the 10m physical sales for Battlefield 1 by the way? Trying to find anything related to it is a nightmare with all the Battlefiled V news at the moment.

EoinHef wrote: »

Well depends on whose version of the story you read. A lot people asked how does this character fit into the time period and the game. Which i thought was a reasonable question.

To which an EA exec responded by saying people were mysogonististic uneducated fools basically. That set the tone for what followed. That guy,who paid for that with his job,was all too quick to jump to conclusions that everyone who was asking the question was asking because they were ALL some sort of alt right or something.

Now obviously there would have been people asking the question that were all he described but a lot were not. Calling everyone uneducated mysogonists before even the reasonable parts of the debate could have been had is not a good start to any discourse.

Why he couldnt have just said "We feel its important to include a diverse cast in the game even if the portrayal of some character will be less historically accurate"

Nothing wrong with that.

Is this Söderlund? Cos that's not what happened...

His comments were made at E3 during an interview with Gamasutra, which occurred over a month after the trailer which kicked the whole kerfuffle off, and were in no way as insulting as made out. As for the idea that he was fired, on the basis that EA had just given him a $20m bonus via stock awards for the fiscal year, which had ended just three months prior, for the specific purpose of "support[ing] the longer-term retention" of the dude, I find that rather unlikely. :pac:

EA still blaming single player. Deluded.

Potential-Monke

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

Ahem.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlefield_2142

Ah yeah, but that was a good game. I mean in the modern BF, we will need jump boots, lasers, radical colours and hacking. All the stuff CoD did but got slated for, but because it will be BF it will be praised for doing it. Or so the trend seems.

Varik

gizmo wrote: »

Got a source for the 10m physical sales for Battlefield 1 by the way? Trying to find anything related to it is a nightmare with all the Battlefiled V news at the moment.

Nothing official, numbers were from a PS4 and Xbox best selling game list for 2016 (so 2 months). Was at ~6 & ~4 million.

EoinHef

gizmo wrote: »

Is this Söderlund? Cos that's not what happened...

His comments were made at E3 during an interview with Gamasutra, which occurred over a month after the trailer which kicked the whole kerfuffle off, and were in no way as insulting as made out. As for the idea that he was fired, on the basis that EA had just given him a $20m bonus via stock awards for the fiscal year, which had ended just three months prior, for the specific purpose of "support[ing] the longer-term retention" of the dude, I find that rather unlikely. :pac:

Looks plenty insulting to me,basically accusing people who said anything of being uneducated fools. Do you think this addressed the problem or showed a total ignorance on his behalf to understand what was being asked by a lot of people?

Also I never said his response was immediate,a month later is close enough imo. Do you think what he said was a response to the question or just a lazy attempt to shut down any debate by labelling people?

I think he made a massive generalisation in an attempt to avoid any real debate,rather than having the debate but pushing the point they wanted to include a bit of diversity in the cast,which is fair enough.

That bonus money was paid the previous year. He could well have been due that. 3 months is a long time in business,opinions of people can change very quickly. Guess we will never know for sure.

I thought it was poor from EA,rather than push diversity in well reasoned argument we got "if you dont agree your an uneducated fool"

gizmo

EoinHef wrote: »

Looks plenty insulting to me,basically accusing people who said anything of being uneducated fools. Do you think this addressed the problem or showed a total ignorance on his behalf to understand what was being asked by a lot of people?

Also I never said his response was immediate,a month later is close enough imo. Do you think what he said was a response to the question or just a lazy attempt to shut down any debate by labelling people?

I think he made a massive generalisation in an attempt to avoid any real debate,rather than having the debate but pushing the point they wanted to include a bit of diversity in the cast,which is fair enough.

That bonus money was paid the previous year. He could well have been due that. 3 months is a long time in business,opinions of people can change very quickly. Guess we will never know for sure.

I thought it was poor from EA,rather than push diversity in well reasoned argument we got "if you dont agree your an uneducated fool"

Eye of the beholder I guess, I didn't find it in the least bit insulting but then again, I also don't think he was in any way referring to the people who may have been innocently asking why that dude had a katana or why the chick's prosthetic limb looked fully functional. The uneducated comment, specifically, was rather plainly made in the context of "The common perception is that there were no women in World War II" bit imo.

The month later part is in relation to the idea that his comment "set the tone for what followed". I'd argue that the tone was already set, lowered to be more precise, following the release of the trailer. The question he answered is in the piece though, "...There's the women being featured in Battlefield backlash, too. Can you give some insight of what it was like internally?" and I think he covered that as well as I'd expect under the circumstances.

Money wise, this an SEC filing, it has to be incredibly specific, so I find it simply inconceivable that they would say this:

The special equity award also was intended to support the longer-term retention of Mr. Söderlund, given that his creative successes, executive experience and high profile in the industry make him a highly desirable candidate for executive positions at other companies, including our competitors in the gaming industry, as well as broader technology companies pursuing interactive entertainment.

After offering him a bonus that brings his compensation package above that of their CEO, if they were willing to then sack him a couple of months later (the filing was made in June, he left in August) over a potentially-contentious comment made in an interview three months before the release of the game in question. You're absolutely correct though, we don't know for sure, but on the balance of probabilities, it seems the most likely reasoning.

As a matter of interest, would you still consider the response poor form if you removed the words "These are people who are uneducated—they don't understand that this is a plausible scenario, and"?

gizmo

Here's a decent example of why it's not the best idea to use a company's stock price as a stick to beat them with.

Take-Two shares sink as forecasts fall short

Take-Two. The dudes who published RDR2. The game that sold 23m copies and has the future potential of RDR Online.

Stocks dropped 10% because they're set to make $2.94b instead of the market analyst's estimate of $2.98b this year.

Comments from Daniel Ahmad again.

EoinHef

gizmo wrote: »

Eye of the beholder I guess, I didn't find it in the least bit insulting but then again, I also don't think he was in any way referring to the people who may have been innocently asking why that dude had a katana or why the chick's prosthetic limb looked fully functional. The uneducated comment, specifically, was rather plainly made in the context of "The common perception is that there were no women in World War II" bit imo.

The month later part is in relation to the idea that his comment "set the tone for what followed". I'd argue that the tone was already set, lowered to be more precise, following the release of the trailer. The question he answered is in the piece though, "...There's the women being featured in Battlefield backlash, too. Can you give some insight of what it was like internally?" and I think he covered that as well as I'd expect under the circumstances.

Money wise, this an SEC filing, it has to be incredibly specific, so I find it simply inconceivable that they would say this:



After offering him a bonus that brings his compensation package above that of their CEO, if they were willing to then sack him a couple of months later (the filing was made in June, he left in August) over a potentially-contentious comment made in an interview three months before the release of the game in question. You're absolutely correct though, we don't know for sure, but on the balance of probabilities, it seems the most likely reasoning.

As a matter of interest, would you still consider the response poor form if you removed the words "These are people who are uneducated—they don't understand that this is a plausible scenario, and"?

I guess my problem is he addressed,as appears to me,everyone as part of the same group. As in anyone who asked why a woman with a prothestic was featured in a trailer for a game about WW2,where common perception would be that it wasnt a scenario likely to have happened at all,was uneducated.

To me thats allowing your own tone to be lowered to the level of the people he seemingly despised. If i lower the tone of our discussion here it doesnt mean you have to reciprocate. He could have took the time to reason out their thinking without being so patronizing to the people who felt it was a genuine question and that also were not holding pitchforks etc.

They want to push inclusive diverse games,fine,thats there perrogative,ill be buying them if there good games. But lets just call it what it is,a scenario dreamt up by a dev,and not what they want us to see it as,real plausible events from WW2.

I dont harbour anger toward the man,i think it must be a hard industry to keep the tonuge in check,i just thought the route he went was a poor choice.

gizmo

EoinHef wrote: »

I guess my problem is he addressed,as appears to me,everyone as part of the same group. As in anyone who asked why a woman with a prothestic was featured in a trailer for a game about WW2,where common perception would be that it wasnt a scenario likely to have happened at all,was uneducated.

To me thats allowing your own tone to be lowered to the level of the people he seemingly despised. If i lower the tone of our discussion here it doesnt mean you have to reciprocate. He could have took the time to reason out their thinking without being so patronizing to the people who felt it was a genuine question and that also were not holding pitchforks etc.

They want to push inclusive diverse games,fine,thats there perrogative,ill be buying them if there good games. But lets just call it what it is,a scenario dreamt up by a dev,and not what they want us to see it as,real plausible events from WW2.

I dont harbour anger toward the man,i think it must be a hard industry to keep the tonuge in check,i just thought the route he went was a poor choice.

So, best way I can summarise my take on that is this; I don't think he addressed everyone as part of the same group but if I did then I'd probably agree with your take on it. That make sense?

On the historical accuracy thing, my general opinion is fairly straight-forward. The authenticity of the gameplay in Battlefield is so far removed from the authenticity of its settings that I don't find the addition of some of these things too jarring. If the devs want to have a bit of fun and bring in a little bit of Inglourious Basterds, whilst not going far enough so as to warrant a full franchise spin-off, then **** it, it's an annual release, as long as the final game is fun then I'm good with it, we'll see how the public respond and what the studio deliver next.

Taylor365

gizmo wrote: »

Here's a decent example of why it's not the best idea to use a company's stock price as a stick to beat them with.

Take-Two shares sink as forecasts fall short

Take-Two. The dudes who published RDR2. The game that sold 23m copies and has the future potential of RDR Online.

Stocks dropped 10% because they're set to make $2.94b instead of the market analyst's estimate of $2.98b this year.

Comments from Daniel Ahmad again.

Just don't invest in gaming stocks at all.


Way to volatile and sentiment driven. Bad release - bad year.

EoinHef

gizmo wrote: »

So, best way I can summarise my take on that is this; I don't think he addressed everyone as part of the same group but if I did then I'd probably agree with your take on it. That make sense?

On the historical accuracy thing, my general opinion is fairly straight-forward. The authenticity of the gameplay in Battlefield is so far removed from the authenticity of its settings that I don't find the addition of some of these things too jarring. If the devs want to have a bit of fun and bring in a little bit of Inglourious Basterds, whilst not going far enough so as to warrant a full franchise spin-off, then **** it, it's an annual release, as long as the final game is fun then I'm good with it, we'll see how the public respond and what the studio deliver next.

Thats cool i get ye,our takes are different,no worries.

On the authenticity,im fine with them taking a few liberties with the design,in fact something like that could make the series feel less stale for me so id agree there. Lets just call it what it is.

Zero-Cool

Saw Guitar Hero posted that they are giving refunds to people who bought guitar hero live after December 2017. Did a bit of digging and saw the guitar hero live service (24x7 online service playing a huge offering of songs) was shutdown last year and people bought the game not knowing half the game wasn't available. I owned it and the career mode was shockingly bad playing ****ing teen girl pop songs. The live section was class with proper tunes.

Pity the way that franchise went, the first 3 games were epic.

kunst nugget

Apex Legends got 10 million players in 3 days... I can't imagine that's good news for Anthem.

raze_them_all_

kunst nugget wrote: »

Apex Legends got 10 million players in 3 days... I can't imagine that's good news for Anthem.

Full priced games with Mt's should really start to worry

gimli2112

Bad news for EA and their whinge this week that they should have launched with their Battlefield BR rather than "concentrating" on the single player. I love BFV but am delighted this is happening.


I wonder did Respawn tell them they were working on this?

Varik

Don't think there's much overlap between Anthem and Apex. Not like there was with Titanfall 2.


Anthem and The Division 2 being a week a part is probably going to hurt the weaker game, and ones new IP while the other is a sequel to a Tom Clancy game.

raze_them_all_

Varik wrote: »

Don't think there's much overlap between Anthem and Apex. Not like there was with Titanfall 2.


Anthem and The Division 2 being a week a part is probably going to hurt the weaker game, and ones new IP while the other is a sequel to a Tom Clancy game.

Once the novelty of the suits wear off people will get sick of basically the same game but one is stuffed with mt

raze_them_all_

raze_them_all_ wrote: »

Once the novelty of the suits wear off people will get sick of basically the same game but one is stuffed with mt

Agreed, and sounds familiar.

Here, have a very lazily put together meme.

gimli2112

I'm only thanking that cos you admitted how lazy an effort it was.


I loved Destiny 1 and got a lot of hours out of 2 but it is an inferior product in so many ways.