Economics · Society

The Battlefield V PR Fiasco

I don’t spend much time on video games, but I have a rough picture of what the biggest franchises are. Also, if there is a good independent game, I tend to hear about it within a few years. While many indie games have the problem of putting their SJW agenda above gameplay, and if it’s not that, then they tend to put their misconception of what pixelated graphics used to look like front and center. Both problems have, to varying extents, been seeping into mainstream games as well.

It seems when mainstream games tackle issues like the empowerment women, they go all out, just like mainstream movies do it. The feminist remake of Ghostbusters was a debacle. The recent Star Wars movie in which some chick is born with the innate ability to yield the lightsaber and fly the Millennium Falcon — or was it the Millennial Falcon? The mainstream video game industry is looking at movies as a source of inspiration. Indeed, it seems that your average creative director at an AAA studio would much rather make movies, judging from the focus on story-telling via cut scenes, which I find very off-putting.

The studio Electronic Arts is not known for subtlety. They got an enormous backlash for the way they handled monetization in a recent game, I think it was Star Wars: Battle Front 2. I read it didn’t do so well in the end. The same fate may await the next big EA game: Battlefield V. In a trailer, we see women with lesbian haircuts shoot it out with Nazis without swastikas, and presumably a sizeable minority of blacks, too. What takes the cake is that one of the characters most prominently featured in the trailer has a primitive prosthetic hand that looks like a hook. Yup, that’s realism right there: a handicapped woman with a lesbian haircut fighting at the frontline in World War 2! Somehow that must have slipped from the history books.

The cover of the game is adorned by just one character: a female soldier. That is, unfortunately, nothing but pandering to an audience that doesn’t buy their games anyway. Female SJWs hardly play games, and male SJWs don’t have enough testosterone to find competition appealing. That may also be the reason why women, in general, don’t like competitive gaming. That, and losing all the time due to the skill gap that may have a variety of pc and non-pc reasons.

The Battlefield franchise is handled by DICE, which are located in cucked Stockholm, which is in the middle of cucked Sweden. Those people have been flirting with SJW ideas and proponents for years. For instance, you’ll find tweets of the DICE team, fawning over Anita Sark-eww-zian. Supposedly, she had a consulting role on a few games, and if it’s not that, then feminist and SJW influence is nonetheless clearly noticeable in many recent games, indie and AAA alike.

Star Wars: Battle Front II did horribly for EA. I think the drop in sales was an order of magnitude. This points to the big issue with forcing an SJW agenda down the throat of an audience that doesn’t appreciate it. First, there aren’t many SJWs around. They are just a very, very vocal minority. Second, the people who buy and play those games are sick of SJW indoctrination. Indeed, the gamer community is one of very few that push back vigorously towards SJWs. There is a third issue: multiplayer-focussed games rely on the network effect. If all your friends play on PlayStation, you’ll get a PlayStation. This explains why some consoles do better than others. Then, once you’ve got your PlayStation, you need to get some games, too. As you’re a dudebro playing online with your buddies, you’ll buy whatever they buy. The purchase of the opinion leader in a group of dudebros leads to the entire group buying the same game. Heck, I’ve heard stories of guys who have never met playing online together for years, moving from one game to the other.

The network effect helps competitive games thrive. You need to get the influencers involved, which doesn’t just mean a bunch of jerk-offs on YouTube, but Mike and Joe who have so much clout over their friends that they can influence their purchase decisions. Here’s where things can easily go wrong: Competitive multiplayer games can become very popular very quickly due to the network effect. However, there is also a negative network effect: if all the Mikes and Joes skip Battlefield V, then the sales potential of that game will be severely affected. Instead of seeing exponential growth in a game that is taking off, you’ll see an exponential decline compared to the predecessor due to the audience leaving not one by one but as entire groups.

I hope that we’ll see a repeat of Star Wars: Battle Front II, i.e. EA making a lot less money than with the preceding game. Money is indeed where you can hit those companies, and if those companies aren’t run by complete morons, they won’t cut down their money trees. On that note, the behavior of Valve, which runs the very popular Steam storefront for digital games, is noteworthy. At first, it seemed the SJWs had won, as Steam either took down or threatened to take down games with anime titties. Very soon afterwards, though, some sense got into them and they addressed the community, pointing out that sex and violence will remain on Steam, and that only clearly illegal games, say if you rip off assets, or obvious trolling attempts, such as a recent high-school shooting simulation, won’t get listed. Valve has figured out that SJWs don’t buy games, and that it would be moronic to listen to them.


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10 thoughts on “The Battlefield V PR Fiasco

  1. EA is also censoring and pissing off its fans/paying customers : boundingintocomics.com/2018/06/15/battlefield-sub-reddit-censors-critics-of-battlefield-v/

    I don’t get why companies pander to feminists and SJW types who are not buying their product while simultaneously alienating their paying audience. 2 + 2 = 5, I suppose.

    Anyways maybe battle field V would be accurate if the female characters were those supposed “White tights” or “night terrors” of Russia (or was that all russian propaganda…) (reference : https://www.globalresearch.ca/how-the-west-ignores-women-as-actors-in-otherized-societies-a-sociological-unraveling-of-the-logos-of-the-soviet-amazons/5372529)

  2. Ironically, the best competitive shooter EA ever had was sandwiched between COD and Battlefield during release back in late 2016. Suicide. Seriously legit and underrated game. Still holds a super competitive small player base today. My heart sank when the studio responsible for it took a 400 million dollar buy out from EA this past year. They’re currently working on a 3rd person Jedi based Star Wars game for EA and some other unrevealed stuff.

    I think a big part of SWBF2’s failure was due to the pay to win gambling system that was included in it at launch. Just what I heard. The game looked fine enough when I checked it out, but people were pissed about paying $60 bucks for a game then getting micro-scammed bit by bit. And transactions post launch should be strictly cosmetic imo.

    It would seem that with the backlash that the Star Wars movies are getting and more and more of their other media outlets flopping, that people are just going to give up on the series as a whole. RIP. Glad to see Disney get raked over the coals a bit. Fuck them.

    1. What EA game are you referring to?

      I think even micro-transactions for cosmetics are detrimental as I like the idea of getting a complete game, without getting nickel and dimed. For some studios, cosmetics are the main revenue stream, such as for Tecmo’s Dead or Alive, where all skins together would cost hundreds of dollars. (After typing the last sentence and went on Steam: I was wrong, the total would be well above 1,000 dollars!)

    2. The EA game I’m referring to is a sci-fi shooter by a developer called Respawn. It’s simply EA’s best shit. Has to be. Titanfall 2. I don’t care that EA published it and did a shit job marketing it, I don’t care that it has cosmetics because all the core gameplay is never affected and there was tons of free dlc coming out periodically for a good while. Frankly, I’d Iike it if this company made as much money as possible because I’d like for them to continue the series, so long as they don’t cuck it.

      This video does a good job of describing the game as well as showing off some decent footage.

      https://youtu.be/I9kH6aDdwqg

      The game takes a fair amount of skill that your average shooter player with decent aim would struggle with once they’re suddenly up against high velocity flying targets and massive armor plated death machines.

      1. That’s interesting! I recall Titanfall (1) for it’s cringe-worthy orchestrated PR campaign (“Have you seen Titanfall?”). The release of Titanfall 2 seems to have been a fairly low-key event. The footage looks interesting; I don’t follow the FPS scene much, but I can see that the skill ceiling of Titanfall 2 is a lot higher than customary in this genre.

      2. Cool. You’re right about skill ceiling. The ironic part for me is that it’s literally the only online shooter I’ve ever gotten into. I used get so pissed off because I’d get like 0-2 kills in a match early on haha.

        For the record, I don’t currently own a console. I’ve had the luxary of being able to use other people’s gear for the past few years. Despite not owning one, I’ve managed to put quite a bit of time into Titanfall 2 over the past (almost) 2 years just by binging it here and there and get pretty decent.

        The only thing that could make me break down and buy a PS4 is Kingdom Hearts 3 (jk).

  3. These micro-transactions for cosmetics would be just fine in a fantasy MMO. But putting unrealistic features in a ww2 shooter is just stupid. Specially when it’s done to push a political believe. The hole battlefield 5 thing was a disaster. And it’s just sad. If they wouldn’t had done the sjw bullshit. It could have been one of the best selling games. The reactions to the backlash by EA were also horrible. You would almost think they don’t like making money. It’s just stupid. You would think somebody at EA would have done business school. But they screw up even at the basics. The same go’s for starwars. It’s just unbelievable how bad these people are at their job. Considering the amounts of money going into this. How in hell can somebody put these people in charge of large projects like this? They should be flipping burgers. That should be the hight of their career. I wouldn’t even trust them to actually sell the burger. Just flipping them somewhere in the back.

    1. Maybe they should’ve made a $5 cosmetic purchase of a swastika patch for your elite female African Waffen SS character in CoDWWII. Then you can purchase the blonde hair and blue eyes to go with it.

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