Before Electronic Arts goes private in a groundbreaking sale, some US lawmakers are pleading for some federal oversight. Democratic members of the US Congress, as part of the Congressional Labor Caucus, penned a letter asking the Federal Trade Commission to “thoroughly review” the $55 billion acquisition of EA.
EA confirmed the sale to the Public Investment Fund, or the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners in September, but the deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2027. Before the official change of ownership, the 46 House Democrats who signed the letter to the FTC are calling for more scrutiny into the impacts of the deal.
The letter noted some of the most consequential effects, including the worsening of an unstable industry, the potential for more layoffs and increased market dominance for EA. “We respectfully urge the Commission to conduct a thorough investigation into the labor market consequences of this proposed acquisition, including EA’s existing wage-setting power, the likelihood of post-transaction layoffs, the degree of labor-market concentration in relevant geographic and occupational markets, and the role of cross-ownership in shaping labor outcomes,” the letter read.
The letter already earned support from the Communications Workers of America union, who also supported a petition from the United Video Games union. As spotted by Eurogamer, the petition calls on regulators and elected officials to “scrutinize this deal and ensure that any path forward protects jobs and preserves creative freedom.”
From Dec 15-24, we’re shining the spotlight on titles in The Play List and trials — with unique benefits and challenges. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass members receive EA Play with their subscription, so make sure to check out all your rewards starting today.
EA Play’s Holiday Picks
Sports games dominate days 1 to 4, with EA Sports UFC 5 ringing the starting bell. Set up your favorite matches from 2025 to relive iconic wins or change their outcomes.
Then switch gears for day 2, and play up to 10 hours of EA Sports College Football 26. Plus, grab this month’s reward, the EA Play Loyalist Ultimate Team Pack (now through December 31), if you haven’t claimed it yet. Replay one of last year’s memorable bowl matchups, and see if you can flip the results.
On day 3, we’re highlighting EA Sports FC 26 with a 10-hour trial and Holiday Header Blue Boots (now through December 25). Show off your festive flair in Clubs, and recreate iconic matches between the league’s biggest rivals.
Then it’s off to gridiron greatness in Madden NFL 26. Try it out for up to 10 hours and pick up a MUT EA Play December Pack (now through December 31). Test your skills by playing your favorite NFL team’s latest matchup, or take them on a historic postseason run ahead of the upcoming NFL playoffs.
Step out of the sports arena on day 5 with 2 Star Wars titles available on The Play List. Play as iconic characters from the movies in Star Wars Battlefront II. A fan of the Light or Dark side? Try fighting for the opposite side! Or launch Star Wars Jedi: Survivor to take on a single-player narrative where you wield the Force as Cal Kestis.
Next up on day 6 is Battlefield 6, the new standard for FPS combat. Save 10% on the Standard or Phantom Edition as a member, and receive an EA Play Deployment Pack and Season 1 Pack (now through January 19). Can you harness Tactical Destruction and destroy 10 structures in one match?
Next up on day 7, celebrate the end of the racing season with a 5-hour trial and 5,000 XP Boost (now through December 31) in EA Sports F1 25. Up for a challenge? Break the fastest lap record on your favorite track.
The holidays aren’t complete without a little bling, so log in to Apex Legends on day 8 to redeem a Gold Topper Weapon Charm (now through January 5). Update your loadout today.
On day 9, pay a visit to your Sims in The Sims 4 — did we mention it’s free to play? — and add to their adventures with packs (10% off for members). Design a year-end retreat, city loft or creative build that captures your favorite vibe.
All roads lead to play on day 10. Get 10% off San Van Bucks, and use them to unlock the Premium skate.Pass, cosmetics, and more. Skate in style, and drop in to San Vansterdam now.
To learn more about EA Play, check out X and Instagram, or visit here. For more details on all the EA Play member benefits this month, visit the EA Play Member Benefits site. Conditions, limitations and exclusions apply. See EA Play Terms for details.
Members can experience the world of EA with unlimited access to a collection of top titles, trials of select new games, in-game member rewards, 10% on EA digital purchases and more.
Development on the next Mass Effect is still underway, Mass Effect executive producer Mike Gamble confirmed in a blog post celebrating the series’ “N7 Day” fan holiday. Bioware shared that it had started work on the new game in 2020, but Electronic Arts’ decision to go private have naturally called the future of the series into question.
Gamble’s blog post doesn’t share many details about the new game beyond the fact that Bioware “is heads-down and focused exclusively on Mass Effect.” What does seem more clear is that the game could have some kind of connection to the Mass Effect TV show currently in development at Amazon. “The writers room is going strong, and we’ve got a lot figured out about how it fits within the Mass Effect canon, and where it sits in respect to the new game,” Gamble says. Notably, the series is set after the events of the original trilogy of games, and follows a new story in the universe’s timeline. “It won’t be a retread of Commander Shepard’s story.”
Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Bioware’s last game, was not the smash hit EA apparently wanted it to be, and Bioware has appeared to go through a period of contraction in response. High-profile senior staff were let go in January 2025, and even before the game was released, EA began moving Bioware developers to other studios. EA itself may also be adjusting its larger game development strategy. Following its proposed acquisition, the publisher announced a partnership with Stability AI in October to create new AI-powered tools to better streamline its development process.
The Mass Effect series is beloved, and Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, the 2021 remaster that packaged all the trilogy’s DLC and games into a single package, was a great reminder. With a new entry and a TV show in the works, Bioware seems poised for a comeback. It just needs to survive EA until then.
Electronic Arts has announced a new partnership with Stability AI, the creator of AI image generation tool Stable Diffusion. The company will “co-develop transformative AI models, tools, and workflows” for the game developer, with the hopes of speeding up development while maintaining quality.
“I use the term smarter paintbrushes,” Steve Kestell, Head of Technical Art for EA SPORTS said in the announcement. “We are giving our creatives the tools to express what they want.” To start, the “smarter paintbrushes” EA and Stability AI are building are concentrated on generating textures and in-game assets. EA hopes to create “Physically Based Rendering materials” with new tools “that generate 2D textures that maintain exact color and light accuracy across any environment.”
The company also describes using AI to “pre-visualize entire 3D environments from a series of intentional prompts, allowing artists to creatively direct the generation of game content.” Stability AI is most famous for its powerful Stable Diffusion image generator, but the company maintains multiple tools for generating 3D models, too, so the partnership is by no means out of place.
It helps that AI is on the tip of most video game executives’ tongues. Strauss Zelnick, the head of Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two, recently shared that generative AI “will not reduce employment, it will increase employment,” because “technology always increases productivity, which in turn increases GDP, which in turn increases employment.” Krafton, the publisher of PUBG: Battlegrounds, made its commitment to AI even more clear, announcing plans on Thursday to become an AI-first company. Companies with a direct stake in the success of the AI industry, like Microsoft, have also created gaming-focused tools and developed models for prototyping.
The motivations for EA might be even simpler, though. The company is in the midst of being taken private, and will soon be saddled with billions in debt. Theoretically cutting costs with AI might be one way the company hopes to survive the transition.
Electronic Arts is close to reaching a $50 billion deal that will turn it into a privately held company, according to The Wall Street Journal. The video game company filed for an IPO way back in 1990 and has been public ever since, but now a group of investors are in talks with the company to take it private. Those investors reportedly include private equity firm Silver Lake, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners, whose largest source of funding is also Saudi’s PIF.
It’s worth noting that EA’s shares are already tied to major financial organizations, even though it’s publicly traded, with Saudi’s PIF owning almost 10 percent of the company. As Reuters notes, analysts believe Saudi is interested in buying out EA due to its annual release of popular sports titles, including Madden and NHL, which makes for predictable earnings.
Saudi has made several major investments in the video gaming industry overall as part of its efforts to prepare for a post-oil economy. In addition to its investment in EA, it also purchased stakes in Take-Two Interactive, Activision Blizzard, Nintendo and the Embracer Group. In March, Pokémon Go maker Niantic sold its gaming division to a Saudi-owned company, as well. Unlike PIF and Kushner’s Affinity Partners, Silver Lake doesn’t have a huge stake in EA at the moment and doesn’t have notable gaming investments other than its stake in Unity.
Bloomberg and The Financial Times report that the company could announce the buyout as soon as next week, but details could change since nothing has been finalized yet. If the $50 billion deal does push through, it’ll become the biggest leveraged buyout of all time.
People walk past the image of the ‘Monkey King’ character, or ‘Sun Wukong’ of Chinese action role-playing game ‘Black Myth: Wukong’, developed by Chinese video game company Game Science, during its launch day in Hangzhou, in eastern China’s Zhejiang province on August 20, 2024.
Str | Afp | Getty Images
BEIJING – China’s first attempt at a top-tier video game has smashed world records, bolstering the industry’s global ambitions just a few years after Beijing’s gaming crackdown.
Black Myth: Wukong, an action game set in mythological China, sold more than 10 million units three days after its launch on Aug. 20. Ten days later, the title still ranked second by revenue in the U.S., and No. 1 globally, according to the Steam video game platform where it sells for around $60 or more.
“I think the next triple-A game is likely very close, because Black Myth: Wukong has shown everyone that a China-made AAA game can reach such high global sales,” said Dino Ying, chairman of Hero Games, which co-published the game and was an early investor in its developer Game Science. That’s according to a CNBC translation of his Mandarin-language remarks in an exclusive interview Thursday.
Ying said he knew of at least one such game under development, which his business partner at Hero Games has invested in. But he declined to share a timeframe.
As for how well Black Myth: Wukong has done, Ying only said sales have since increased by “much more” than the 10 million unit figure, although he indicated it had not yet doubled.
He said that in the future, the company’s game releases will have a global strategy from the start. He also expects foreign AAA game developers to realize how large China’s market is and tailor more features to Chinese players.
AAA games generally refer to titles with high graphics quality and significant marketing. That’s meant such video games have tended to come from companies such as Nintendo, Ubisoft and Electronic Arts.
“China is a big country. We’re talking about 1 million concurrent players,” said Ivan Su, senior equity analyst at Morningstar. “China has 600 million gamers.”
He said the reason why China hasn’t previously developed its own AAA game, which are typically played on computers and consoles, is the years-long production time. “It’s much more cost-effective if you create mobile games,” Su said.
When Hero Games first invested in Game Science, Apple CEO Tim Cook visited in 2017 and was so impressed by the first game, Art of War: Red Tides, he gave it the front page of the iOS App store in 178 countries, Ying said.
But that wasn’t a commercial success.
Apple CEO Tim Cook visited the office of Hero Games in 2017 after it invested in Game Science, which went on to develop Black Myth: Wukong.
Hero Games
Hero Games had already spent three years investing 60 million yuan (about $8.5 million today) in two failed projects from Game Science when the developer approached Ying and his team in August 2020 about Black Myth: Wukong, he said.
“We’re very lucky, we didn’t give up on Game Science before it succeeded,” Ying said, noting his business partner Daniel Wu, now CEO of Hero Games, had first discovered the startup.
“We aren’t saying to blindly wait for all people,” he said. “When you see that kind of talent, you need to be confident that that talent has been underappreciated. It may not have found the right direction. [So you just need to] help it to find it.”
Two days before Game Science planned to release a promotional video for Black Myth: Wukong, the company showed it to Ying and asked his team for at least 100 million yuan more, he said. If not, he said the startup planned to ask Bilibili, a major Chinese video streaming and game platform.
After watching the video, Ying said he told his team that “I really don’t want to miss this opportunity because this is the best game that I have seen in my life.”
Tencent then bought a 5% stake, but said it would not interfere with Game Science’s plans, Ying said. “Because this was an AAA game, under the normal process of a big business, there was no way it would have been approved.”
Hero Games’ initial investment in Game Science was for a 20% stake.
Beijing has only in the last two years started to approve games, after suspending new titles and limiting how many hours minors could play in 2021.
Black Myth: Wukong got China’s government approval in February. No part of the game needed to be changed for it to pass, Ying said.
“Personally I think in the past two years the regulation is increasingly respectful of the game industry and is beneficial to its development,” Ying said, noting that one or two years ago, there “was a misunderstanding.”
In the first half of this year, domestic game sales in China reached 147.27 billion yuan, said Ashley Dudarenok, founder of China digital consultancy ChoZan, citing industry figures.
Ying pointed out that many people in China bought PlayStations or upgraded their graphics cards after Black Myth: Wukong’s release, similar to how many people first bought the Nintendo Switch because of Zelda.
Something that’s lasted 1,000 years, people will definitely like it
Dino Ying
Hero Games, chairman
As for the global market, Dudarenok said overseas sales of China-developed games rose to $16.4 billion in 2023, up from $11.6 billion in 2019.
“Chinese games often incorporate rich cultural elements that appeal more and more to a global audience,” she said. “This unique cultural flavor sets them apart from games developed in other regions”
Ying said he expects China has at least five to 10 other stories that have been passed down over the last millennia that can be turned into games.
“If I create a new thing, I don’t know if people will like it. But something that’s lasted 1,000 years, people will definitely like it,” Ying said. “We don’t know why it was preserved over so many years. But we just need to respect the [original] artisans.”
He said Game Science sent teams and equipment to ancient temples in China to scan and replicate the designs, boosting the game’s immersive feel.
In the more niche market of independent games, Chinese companies are also on the rise.
Shanghai-based Cotton Game, which has a staff of 70 people, won the 2024 award for best development team in indie games from the French-supported Game Connection organization and ChinaJoy, which runs a major annual game conference in China.
“It depends on how capable we are, but [we hope to] use games as a way to share art, philosophy and thoughtful content,” the company’s CEO, who goes by the English name Cotton Guo, said in Mandarin translated by CNBC.
Cotton Game’s Sunset Hills – which took five years to draw by hand – also won the “Game of the Year” and “Best Indie Game” awards. The $20 game launched on Aug. 21 on Steam after raising $13,000 on Kickstarter.
The game follows an anthropomorphic dog through a Europe-like village, accompanied by the sounds of nature and music. Players solve puzzles along the way.
“Everyone is quite tired. In society today, the speed of life is very fast,” Robin Luo, the manager of Sunset Games. Its main character is based on his own dog. “So my hope while making Sunset Hills was that everyone playing the game could [find it] refreshing.”
EA reported its fourth-quarter and full fiscal year 2024 earnings Tuesday, revealing results that matched the video game company’s own guidance and analysts’ estimates, but forecasts for harder quarters ahead.
Full game sales between Jan 1 and March 31 of this year were $333 million (down from $372 million in the comparable Q4 fiscal 2023 quarter), while live services and “other” revenue totaled $1.45 billion (down from $1.5 billion a year ago, and from last quarter’s record growth of $1.7 billion).
Profit for the quarter was $182 million compared to a loss of $12 million in Q4 2023.
Wall Street forecast earnings per share (EPS) of $1.52 on $1.66 billion in revenue, according to analyst consensus data provided by LSEG, formerly Refinitiv. EA reported adjusted EPS of $1.37 on $1.78 billion (down from $1.87 billion year over year) in revenue. Net bookings were $1.67 billion (down from $1.95 billion). All results were in line with EA’s own guidance.
Net bookings for the entire fiscal year 2024 (which ran April 1, 2023-March 31, 2024) were $7.4 billion (up 1% from the previous year) and revenue was $7.6 billion, in line with guidance between $7.3-7.7 billion and slightly under Wall Street analysts’ estimates at $7.7 billion.
Per EA, the “Madden NFL” franchise saw record net bookings for the year, up 6%, and double-digit growth in weekly average users for “Madden NFL 24” and “Madden Mobile.”
Looking ahead to fiscal year 2025, EA expects net revenue between $7.1 and $7.5 billion. Net income is projected to be $904 million to $1.1 billion.
For the first quarter of fiscal 2025 (which runs April 1-June 30 of this year), EA expects revenue of $1.58 to $1.68 billion and EPS of 73 to 90 cents. Net bookings are estimated between $1.15 and $1.25 billion.
Those projections come in comparison to Q1 fiscal 2024, which benefited from the World Cup and the release of “Star Wars Jedi: Survivor.”
“This year, EA delivered bigger, bolder world class entertainment that engaged and connected hundreds of millions of players and fans,” EA CEO Andrew Wilson said in a letter to shareholders. “We will continue to build on this strong momentum through an incredible pipeline of new experiences, starting with college football in FY25, positioning us for accelerated growth in FY26 and beyond.”
EA CFO Stuart Canfield added: “EA’s FY24 was highlighted by record cash flow and strong earnings growth driven by ‘EA Sports FC’ and ‘Madden NFL.’ With strong conviction in our future, we are announcing an expanded stock repurchase program. We look forward to sharing more about our long- term strategy and financial framework at our Investor Day this fall.”
EA stock closed Tuesday at $130.24 per share. The regular U.S. stock markets will reopen at 9:30 a.m. ET.
Wilson, Canfield and other EA executives will host a conference call at 4 p.m. ET to discuss the quarter in greater detail.
Video game company Electronic Arts will lay off 5 precent of its workforce according to a report it filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday. More than 650 EA employees will lose their jobs as a result of the move, part of a broader restricting that will see the company cutting back on office space and ending work on some video games.
EA’s cuts are the latest in a long line of layoffs that have rocked the video game industry since last year. In 2023, more than 10,500 video game workers lost their jobs, and more than 6,000 people in the industry were cut in January 2024 alone. The video game companies that have laid off workers so far include Microsoft, Riot Games, and Unity among many others. On Tuesday, Sony announced that it was laying off 900 people from its PlayStation division, roughly 8 percent of its headcount.
In a memo sent to EA employees, CEO Andrew Wilson wrote that the company is “streamlining our company operations to deliver deeper, more connected experiences for fans everywhere.” EA expects to finish making the cuts by early next quarter, the memo says. The cuts, Wilson adds, will let EA focus more on its “biggest opportunities — including our owned IP, sports, and massive online communities.”
Think the first week of January is a slow one for news? Think again. A 13-year-old Tetris phenom has boldly gone where no one has gone before, beating the NES version of the classic puzzler by reaching a “kill screen” on level 157. Steam announced the occasionally baffling results of its annual players’ choice awards, and The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall got a free-to-play, fan-made remaster.
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Before Starfield, before Skyrim, before Fallout 3 and Oblivion, before your parents even knew how to make you, there was The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. It was, and remains, Bethesda’s biggest-ever game, and now a fan-made rebuilding of the entire vast world in Unity has reached its 1.0 release. Oh, and it’s entirely free, and won’t be destroyed by lawyers! This new Daggerfall is an almighty achievement, and exactly the excuse you needed to return to Tamriel. – John Walker Read More
The results of 2023’s Steam Awards are in. Each year, Steam turns to the community to vote on the year’s best games across a wide variety of categories. This year saw Larian Studios’ RPG Baldur’s Gate 3 grab game of the year, while Lethal Company, a first-person cooperative horror game,got the “Better With Friends Award” for its co-op gameplay. The Last of Us Part I snagged Best Soundtrack, which seems odd because it came out in 2013, but it technically wasn’t added to Steam until 2023. – Claire Jackson Read More
Just two months after the third-person action-horror game Stray Souls came out, developer Jukai Studio abruptly shuttered its doors, citing myriad issues including poor game sales and multiple cyberattacks from an unknown perpetrator.The developer took to X/Twitter on December 22 to announce the sudden closure. Part of the problem, Jukai Studio said, was Stray Souls’ abysmal reception and sales, which made the team “completely unable to sustain the company.” – Levi Winslow Read More
Classic puzzle game Tetris has been around for over three decades, and in that time, plenty of people have reached its various endings, usually by clearing four rows of bricks at once like a digital demolitioner. That’s a challenge in and of itself, but now, someone has taken the concept of “beating Tetris” to the extreme by playing the NES game so hard it straight-up crashed, a phenomenon also known as the “kill screen.” – Levi Winslow Read More
Forever-in-development space sim Star Citizenmight not be finished after over a decade of dev work and announcements, but it does already contain a lot of expensive ships you can buy and fly around in. And if you want all of those ships in one big DLC pack, Star Citizen has an option for you. Just be prepared to spend over $48,000. – Zack Zwiezen Read More
Here’s something unironically wonderful. Via a post by Larian Studios writer Rachel Quirke, we’ve just learned of a deeply moving tribute to a player’s father that appears in the studios’ award-winning RPG Baldur’s Gate 3. In October 2020, a member of the Larian forums posted to thank the developer for releasing the first act of the game in Early Access, because it allowed them to enjoy one last adventure with their father, who had recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. – John Walker Read More
Screenshot: Ubisoft Massive Entertainment / Kotaku
Star Wars Outlaws, Ubisoft’s upcoming action-adventure game that follows scoundrel Kay Vess between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, previously had no release date beyond a very broad “2024” window. Today, however, a Disney Parks blog post quietly announced that it would launch in “late 2024.” This didn’t last long, as Ubisoft promptly swooped in to correct the record and re-assert the general 2024 timeframe. – Levi Winslow Read More
City of Heroes was a beloved MMORPG that launched in April 2004 and lasted just over eight years. In that time it won a dedicated community of players who, even after the game died, kept playing the MMO via private servers that existed in a weird legal gray area. But now, the developers behind City of Heroes have given one private server the official thumbs-up to keep on keeping on. – Zack Zwiezen Read More
EA’s next soccer game is going to be a bit different than most of its countless sports releases. That’s because, unlike FIFA or Madden, its upcoming FC Tactical is a turn-based RPG-like soccer game featuring magical-seeming special moves. Weird, but intriguing!
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Announced on October 11,EA Sports’s FC Tactical is a free-to-play soccer game for mobile devices launching in 2024. But to be clear: This new game isn’t replacing FC Mobile 24 Soccer, the pre-existing EA soccer game on phones that plays like the console version. Instead, FC Tactical is something very different, described by EA in a press release as a turn-based game that will contain over 5,000 authentic players across 10 leagues, including Premier and Ligue 1.
According to EA, matches are “simulated, with turn-based opportunities” where players will choose to defend, attack, pull off “skill moves,” or take shots at scoring a goal. Screenshots reveal an interface that looks a lot like other turn-based strategy games, just instead of tanks or fantasy warriors, there are soccer players in sports arenas.
Screenshot: EA
EA says FC Tactical will feature a variety of modes including online friend matches, ranked play, leagues, and guilds. Folks will have to “train players” to “master high-skill moves” or unlock specific traits. That sounds a lot like this is some weird soccer RPG, and things only get weirder when you look at some of the screenshots featured on the game’s website and Google Play Store page.
Some of the images show soccer players pulling off what I would describe as special attacks, complete with magical-looking visual effects like flames and energy pulses. I don’t expect any of these players are going to be summoning massive monsters to help them score a goal, but who knows?
CEO John Riccitiello has retired from game development software company Unity after possibly its worst month of bad headlines ever. The tech company that’s slowly morphed into an in-game advertising firm announced a confusing and seemingly predatory new set of fees for game makers in September, only to walk the policy back after studios threatened to abandon the Unity engine moving forward.
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James M. Whitehurst, former head of the IBM-acquired open source software company Red Hat, will take over from Riccitiello as interim CEO while Unity’s board of directors search for a new long-term replacement. “It’s been a privilege to lead Unity for nearly a decade and serve our employees, customers, developers and partners, all of whom have been instrumental to the Company’s growth,” Riccitiello said in a press release. “I look forward to supporting Unity through this transition and following the Company’s future success.”
Riccitiello joined Unity back in 2014 shortly after leaving Electoronic Arts. He oversaw the game engine company’s shift from one-time licensing fees to an ongoing subscription model, launched the IPO in 2020, and made a series of acquisitions, including the in-app monetization firm IronSource in 2022. When Unity first went public, its stock price was around $68. Today it’s just over $30.
Once synonymous with the explosion of creativity and experimental design in the indie gaming space, Unity is being left by Riccitiello a month after a bungled new monetization strategy rollout burned bridges with tons of game makers. The initial messaging made it sound like game developers might be charged fees every time their game was installed, including retroactively.
A follow-up apology by president and general manager Marc Whitten later clarified that the new terms would only apply beginning in 2024, and laid out much bigger carve-outs for smaller studios whose games don’t hit a certain threshold of income. But for many developers it was too late. Their trust in the company had already been irrevocably shaken. Re-logic, maker of the Steam hit Terraria, pledged $200,000 toward the creation of a Unity competitor, and Slay the Spire dev, Mega Crit, says it will still move to rival game software platform Godot.
Rethinking monetization more aggressively was also one of Riccitiello’s legacies at EA. His seven years at the FIFA (now EA Sports FC) and Battlefield publisher saw it experiment with day-one DLC, microtransactions, and a focus on post-launch content. While there was no week-long crisis moment on the scale of what happened at Unity last month, it’s clear he helped usher in the company’s current live-service era, which many players now feel nickel-and-dimed by. Madden and FIFA’s lootbox modes were both added while he was head of EA, though they didn’t become the billion-dollar windfalls they are today until the tenure of his successor, current CEO Andrew Wilson.
Perhaps nothing summed up Riccitiello’s time at both EA and Unity better than another controvertial incident last year. In an interview with Pocketgamer.biz in July 2022, he called developers who don’t think about monetization early in the process “fucking idiots.” He immediately walked the comments back the next week, calling articles about it “clickbait” that took his comment out of context, but later apologized, saying he should have chosen his words more carefully.
That unforced error came shortly after the company revealed hundreds of layoffs at the same time it was buying IronSource in a $4.4 billion all-stock deal. Six hundred more were laid off at Unity earlier this year. Meanwhile, Riccitiello, in addition to the millions he has in Unity stock, will be kept on salary until April of 2024.
Update 10/11/2023 4:50 p.m. ET:SFGate reports that Riccitiello is set to earn up to $8.4 million through stock options over the next six months. That’s in addition to the roughly $253 million he already holds in current Unity stock.
Storied RPG developer BioWare is downsizing. The studio announced on August 23 that it will cut 50 roles as it continues production on both Dragon Age: Dreadwolfand Mass Effect 4, telling fans it needed to take a more “agile and focused” approach to game development.
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“In order to meet the needs of our upcoming projects, continue to hold ourselves to the highest standard of quality, and ensure BioWare can continue to thrive in an industry that’s rapidly evolving, we must shift towards a more agile and more focused studio,” wrote BioWare general manager Gary McKay. “It will allow our developers to iterate quickly, unlock more creativity, and form a clear vision of what we’re building before development ramps up.”
Fifty developers at the studio will be laid off as a result of the restructuring, with McKay claiming the changes are necessary to “create exceptional story-driven single-player experiences” moving forward. Those include Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, which at one point was planned to have multiplayer live-service elements and has continued to face seeming delays and departures in top roles, as well as the next Mass Effect game, which despite promising teases appears to be many years away from release.
“If you’re wondering how all of this will impact development of Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, let me be clear that our dedication to the game has never wavered,” McKay wrote. “Our commitment remains steadfast, and we all are working to make this game worthy of the Dragon Age name. We are confident that we’ll have the time needed to ensure Dreadwolf reaches its full potential.”
The latest round of cuts comes shortly after publisher Electronic Arts announced that BioWare’s longstanding sci-fi MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic, would be outsourced and taken over by a new studio, Broadsword. VentureBeat also reports that BioWare has decided not to renew its contract with Keyword Studios, an in-house contracting company whose employees that were working on BioWare projects recently unionized and have been bargaining on their first contract.
A spokesperson for EA told VentureBeat other work orders had been renewed post-unionization and that it simply failed to arrive at a new agreement with Keyword Studios, meaning work for its onsite QA testers will expire in September.
James Russwurm, a member of the Keywords union embedded with BioWare for several years now, told Kotaku in a phone call that while he’s sad to see the contract not renewed he believes it’s just a cost cutting measure rather than something targeted at the union itself. KWS Edmonton United is still bargaining with Keywords on its first contract and Russwurm was optimistic an agreement could be reached as soon as the end of the year.
The company announced 800 layoffs back in March of this year. In August it posted a quarterly profit of $400 million, up nearly 30 percent from the same time a year prior.
Update 10/4/2023 5:39 p.m. ET: All of the unionized Keywords devs who previoulsy worked at BioWare were laid off at the end of September, Polygon reports. The company cited the lost contract and the employees are currently trying to negotiate over severance.
Something similar happened to bug testers contracted to work at Microsoft in 2016. Despite unionizing and negotiating their first contract, Microsoft eventually canceled its work with the contracting company, which subsquently laid all of the unionized testers off. A union-busting complaint was filed with the NLRB, but legal proceedings moved to slow to get the workers their jobs back.
Update 8/23/2023 2:11 p.m. ET: Added comment from a Keywords Studio contractor.
The video game industry is still reeling from Epic Games’ September 28 announcement that it will lay off nearly 900 employees. If developers at the Fortnite money-printing factory aren’t safe, nobody is. In perhaps the worst-timed microtransaction ever, Fortnite’s “Share The Wealth” emote went back up for sale on the battle royale’s in-game shop later that day.
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It didn’t take Fortnite news accounts like Guille_GAG long to discover the emote had returned to cap off the a day full of grim news. “Epic has brought back the Share the Wealth Emote just after firing 900 of their employees…,” they tweeted. “Epic Games is under fire for selling the ‘Share the Wealth’ Emote in today’s Item Shop rotation – just hours after 830 employees were laid off,” the FortniteBR Instagram account posted.
It appears the emote, which was added to the game earlier this year in Chapter 4: Season 3, was only on sale for a brief period before being removed. According to FortniteBR and others, the emote was removed when Epic took down the entire Daily Rotation tab from the store shortly after the emote went live.
A company spokesperson told Kotaku in an email that the “Share The Wealth” emote was pre-scheduled. “The emote was taken down when we realized the mistake roughly one hour after going live,” they wrote. Epic Games acknowledged the missing feature on Twitter and said it would return during the next item shop refresh.
“We’ve been spending way more money than we earn,” Epic CEO Tim Sweeney wrote in an email to staff announcing the layoffs. It was a peculiar invocation of of the royal “we,” considering the executive then proceeded to list acquisitions, expansions, and other business initiatives, like growing Fortnite as a metaverse-inspired ecosystem for creators, that most of the people laid off probably had no say in.
It’s unclear what sort of salary Sweeney and other executives at the company draw. Epic remains a privately owned company, so it doesn’t have to disclose any of that information. Sweeney has pushed back again the concept of a wealth tax in the past, claiming that it would penalize people like him by forcing them to sell equity in their companies anytime they become more valuable. While the larger company remains a black box, we do know that Fortnite made $9 billion in its first two years, and Epic continues to rake in “billions of dollars a year in revenue from player purchases.”
“The reality of being laid off by Epic while being treated for skin cancer has hit me and woken me from a not sound sleep and I don’t think there are words for how furious I am at the company, the leadership, their greed…all of it.” one former Epic employee tweeted overnight. In the meantime, Epic is still burning money on things like Epic Games Store, its Steam competitor, showering players with free games. The latest freebie is the action RPG Soulstice, which is normally listed at $40.
“Saying goodbye to people who have helped build Epic is a terrible experience for all,” Sweeney wrote in his email to staff. “The consolation is that we’re adequately funded to support laid off employees: we’re offering a severance package that includes six months base pay and in the US/Canada/Brazil six months of Epic-paid healthcare.”
You probably saw a ton of headlines about Xbox leaks this week: new hardware, upcoming games, Game Pass costs, acquisition strategies. A trove of unredacted documents accidentally uploaded to a federal court’s case server gave the world an unprecedented look into the secret machinations of the gaming wing of a $2 trillion tech giant. But if you check out just one leak from this historic week for Xbox it should be Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer’s analysis of what’s currently plaguing triple-A video game publishers.
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His analysis was in an email exchange from March 2020, in the midst of the Xbox team planning ahead of a feedback meeting with Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two. “In terms of subscriptions and the impact on larger publishers I realized that I haven’t really done a good job sharing our view on the disruption AAA publishers potentially see and how their role in the industry will likely change with the growth in subscription platforms like Xbox Game Pass,” Spencer wrote (the memo was directed to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, CFO Amy Hood, then-executive business VP Peggy Johnson, and head of marketing Chris Capossela).
The head of Xbox, who first joined Microsoft as an intern back in 1988 and has been working on the gaming side of its business for over 20 years now, proceeded to diagnose the current state of big publishers as they face wave after wave of market disruption. It was a cogent, incisive commentary on the fears driving an ever-shrinking class of mega gaming companies that are clinging harder and harder to the few big-budget franchises they have that still pay out.
Spencer lays out how publishers once existed to leverage scale in negotiations with retailers for shelf space. Then everything changed. “The creation of digital storefronts like Steam, Xbox Store and PlayStation Store eventually democratized access for creators breaking physical retail’s lock on game distribution,” he writes. “Publishers were slow to react to this disruption. The AAA publishers did not find a way to leverage the moat that physical retail created in the digital realm in a way that had them continue their dominance of the game marketplace.”
Companies like Activision, Electronic Arts, and Ubisoft eventually made their own middle-man clients to try and get around platform fees, and a few later followed up with their own subscription services. None of them were built early enough or offered a compelling enough alternative to get big. Players complained about bad UI and bad deals. Franchises like Call of Duty and Madden that had once abandoned Steam returned. Game Pass got big while EA Play and Ubisoft+ stayed small. The only competitive advantage publishers have left is being able to pour more money than anyone else into annualized blockbusters.
Spencer writes,
Over the past 5-7 years, the AAA publishers have tried to use production scale as their new moat. Very few companies can afford to spend the $200M an Activision or Take 2 spend to put a title like Call of Duty or Red Dead Redemption on the shelf. These AAA publishers have, mostly, used this production scale to keep their top franchises in the top selling games each year. The issue these publishers have run into is these same production scale/cost approach hurts their ability to create new IP. The hurdle rate on new IP at these high production levels have led to risk aversion by big publishers on new IP. You’ve seen a rise of AAA publishers using rented IP to try to offset the risk (Star Wars with EA, Spiderman with Sony, Avatar with Ubisoft etc). This same dynamic has obviously played out in Hollywood as well with Netflix creating more new IP than any of the movie studios.
Specifically, the AAA game publishers, starting from a position of strength driven from physical retail have failed to create any real platform effect for themselves. They effectively continue to build their scale through aggregated per game P&Ls hoping to maximize each new release of their existing IP.
In the new world where a AAA publisher don’t have real distribution leverage with consumers, they don’t have production efficiencies and their new IP hit rate is not disproportionately higher than the industry average we see that the top franchises today were mostly not created by AAA game publishers. Games like Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, Candy Crush, Clash Royale, DOTA2 etc. were all created by independent studios with full access to distribution. Overall this, imo, is a good thing for the industry but does put AAA publishers, in a precarious spot moving forward. AAA publishers are milking their top franchises but struggling to refill their portfolio of hit franchises, most AAA publishers are riding the success of franchises created 10+ years ago.
Microsoft’s answer to this is Game Pass, not out of the goodness of its heart but because it sees a new platform it can scale to feed the financial growth demanded by investors. “Our goal is to find a way to both grow our subscription (which is our new platform) and help the AAA publishers build towards a successful future,” Spencer writes. “For publishers with 2-3 scale franchises that’s a difficult transition. Again, taking a clue from Hollywood, it’s not clear how a standalone subscale media publisher grows is this world without adapting to new paradigms or getting consolidated but we believe we can help a Take2 by increasing monetizable [total addressable market] across more endpoints inside of a global platform like Xbox Game Pass (inclusive of xCloud).”
The suggestion here is that the type of game that can thrive on a subscription service is either a small one that benefits from better curation and visibility or a live-service one that can make up revenue on the backend by charging all the new players microtransactions (the new store shelves are inside the games themselves). That’s also a pretty grim assessment, and probably part of the reason Sony has repeatedly said that bringing its big first-party exclusive games like Spider-Man 2 and The Last of Us to its competing PS Plus service day-and-date would cripple the economics of blockbuster production.
Spencer’s email was written over three years ago at this point, and was aimed largely at trying to summarize the current state of the industry for his bosses. We can see how things have played out since, though. Take-Two, Ubisoft, and Electronic Arts have decided to collaborate with Game Pass, and EA Play is now part of the service. Microsoft, meanwhile, gobbled up ZeniMax (including Bethesda Game Studios), and is now on the cusp of doing the same with subscription holdouts Activision Blizzard. All while smaller competitors like Embracer go into a tailspin.
It’s not clear who the big publisher model was serving after physical games died, outside of the richly compensated CEOs and occasional shareholder buybacks. But it’s also not yet clear that whatever replaces them will serve anyone—developers, players, fans—any better.
You can see the email exchange in its entirety below:
Stig Asmussen, the director behind Respawn Entertainment’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and its recent sequel has left publisher Electronic Arts for unspecified reasons.
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2019’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was a huge hit, selling millions of copies and garnering rave reviews from critics and fans. Earlier this year, the game’s sequel, Jedi: Survivor, debuted to equally positive reviews and sales. Both games were seen by many as a huge improvement over EA’s previous Star Wars output, which included multiplayer shooters and canceled projects. And now, the man who helped lead development on the Jedi games is no longer with Respawn or the studio’s parent company EA.
When asked about the departure, EA provided Kotaku with this statement:
After careful thought and consideration, Stig Asmussen has decided to leave Respawn to pursue other adventures, and we wish him the best of luck. Veteran Respawn leaders will be stepping up to guide the team as they continue their work on Star WarsJedi: Survivor.
The specific reason for Asmussen’s departure is not yet known. His exit from Respawn, at least from the outside, does seem surprising, as the Jedi games have been considered huge successes for EA and its stewardship of Star Wars. His sudden exit seems even more surprising when you consider that, according to Asmussen, the Jedi series of games was always meant to be a trilogy, implying a third game is coming in the future.
In March, a month before the launch of Jedi: Survivor,Asmussen told IGNthat he “always wanted to see [the Jedi saga] as a trilogy.” He explained further that the team had “ideas of what we could do beyond [Jedi: Survivor].”
While it’s very likely EA and Respawn will develop a third game in the popular franchise, completing the presumably planned trilogy, it will seemingly be without the director who helped make the first two chapters memorable.
Respawn and Electronic Arts’ popular single-player Star Wars sequel, Jedi: Survivor, is making the leap from current-gen to the older PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles.
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Launched in April, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is the follow-up to 2019’s Jedi: Fallen Order. In this most recent Star Wars adventure from Titanfall devs Respawn, players again take on the role of Cal Kestis, a Jedi who survived the purge during the end of the Clone Wars as a young boy and who now hangs out with his ragtag found family of misfits as they try to free the galaxy from the Empire’s clutches. This very good follow-up originally skipped last-gen consoles in order to, in the words of the game’s director, offer up a “true new-gen experience.” But now, Cal Kestis is coming to a PS4 near you.
EA didn’t specify when these last-gen ports would be released and declined to offer any extra details to Kotaku.
The publisher clarified that Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’s current versions weren’t going to be left behind, and confirmed that “additional performance improvements” for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC still remained a “top priority” for Respawn. It also promised to share more about these improvements “as soon as the next update is ready.” This is good news, as the game still suffers from performance issues after previous updates helped, but didn’t quite fix, framerate drops and in-game stuttering.
For many, the news that EA is bringing Jedi: Survivor to PS4 and Xbox One will be surprising. While it makes sense from a financial standpoint—those older machines still have millions of dedicated players in 2023—it seems at odds with what Respawn said before the game’s launch.
Specifically, the game’s director Stig Asmussen explained the reason for skipping PS4 and Xbox One was so the team could deliver a “true new-gen experience in the Star Wars universe.” It seems Respawn is also willing to lower the resolution and framerate limits to accommodate the older hardware.
It’s also interesting that the game is coming to older, less powerful machines since Jedi: Survivor seemed to push the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S harder than most games. I’m curious how well the game will run on much older hardware, in particular the base Xbox One, which is rather long in the tooth. These consoles are almost a decade old, now.
There’s an obsession with incremental changes and bullet-point features in the sports game scene, one which challenges fan’s ability to take a step back and assess each game as its own standalone title. It’s something I try and address in my own sports reviews on this site, and it’s something I’m taking to its logical conclusion here in this Quixotic attempt to pluck one game out of hundreds and call it the “best”.
Sports games by their nature don’t turn up for each new season as entirely fresh products. The economics of the industry have determined that they re-use the same engine and models for years at a time, which means the difference between them can often be limited to current uniforms, a few new features and some adjustments to ball physics. And those changes are usually influenced as much by fan feedback as they are by the development teams working on them.
So it’s tough looking at say Madden 17 as something entirely separate, since its creation was heavily influenced by the sales and reception of Madden 16, and it will in turn play a big part in how Madden 18 is designed. How do you pick one of those games and say, ok, THIS ONE is the best, when much of what made it great may have been inspired by—or come directly from—an entirely different video game?
Then you have to take into account the way sports games have changed their entire outlook over the last 20 years. In the 90s, series like FIFA and NBA Live were perfectly happy being fast, accessible, almost arcadey. Fast forward to today and advances in technology have turned blockbuster sports games into simulations, each one trying its hardest to replicate the on-field experience as best it can (or, if it can’t, then the broadcast experience instead). This makes direct comparisons between games in long-running series pretty damn hard!
Making matters worse is that each sport is different, with its own set of fans, style of play and culture. What makes the #1 baseball game better than the #1 hockey game? Is football better than basketball?
……Image: FIFA 98
I think I’ve found one way to compare all sports games, though, and as weird as it may sound at first, it’s through the one thing they all have in common. The one thing they’re more fixated upon than anything else, and which in many ways defines sports video games as their own distinct space in video games. And that’s content.
Every sports game is stingy. It’s possibly the most defining thing about the business, and is often the first thing that non-fans will mock. The genre’s business model is built entirely around balancing the need to make gamers happy with the game they just bought, but unhappy enough that they’ll turn around 12 months later and buy an incredibly similar product.
So after lingering over a short list of truly great sports games—Madden 2002, NBA 2K11, Pro Evolution 6, NBA Jam, NFL 2K5—I’ve settled the tie by going with one that wasn’t just a very good sports game in its own right, but one which decided to just say “fuck it” and give fans everything they could have wanted or needed for years to come, all in the one box.
That game is FIFA: Road to World Cup 98, as bizarre but beloved a major sports game as I think we’re ever going to see.
At the time of its release in 1997, it was a damn fine football game. It had very flash polygonal visuals, audio commentary, all the things we’ve long associated as being hallmarks of the FIFA series. But it’s where the game went above and beyond what we expect of a sports game can include, whether at the time or today, that marks it as truly great.
INDOOR FOOTBALL – In addition to regular 11v11 football, FIFA 98 also included an entirely separate 5v5 indoor mode, with its own rules and conditions, like the fact the ball never went out of bounds. It was just as fun as the actual FIFA. Maybe more fun. And while it had actually been introduced in FIFA 97, the fact it stuck around in 98 when there was so much else in the box is one of the things that helped cement this game’s legacy.
AN ACTUAL WORLD CUP – The reason for the game’s longer title was the fact that the development team decided to include, alongside domestic leagues, the 1998 World Cup. Not just the finals in France, but the entire qualifying system as well. That meant over 170 nations and their squads made it into the game, an absolutely ridiculous number that literally represented every football-playing country on Earth at the time (modern FIFA games usually only include a few dozen). You could, if you wanted, play as one of the smallest nations on the planet, take them all the way through qualifying then win the tournament itself, a feat so monumental that after FIFA 98 it would only be seen again in standalone video games specifically made for World Cups.
Image: FIFA 98
CUSTOMISATION: Besides the 170+ national teams, there were almost 200 club sides included in the game as well. And you could customise the lot. Home kits, away kits, even a player’s appearance. I remember spending what must have been weeks tinkering with this, making sure that every major team’s kit matched its actual design, and that player haircuts had been accurately recreated. This wasn’t just useful in 1997, either; people were playing FIFA 98 for years to come because as 1998, then 1999 rolled around, you could just update the kit designs again.
Here’s the most incredible thing about all this: FIFA 98 was so big it made another of EA’s own video games completely pointless. In addition to FIFA 98 (released in 1997), EA Sports had a game in development designed to cash in on the World Cup itself, due for release in early 1998. Simply called World Cup 1998, it had official branding throughout, from the tournament mascot to branded kits (a first for the series). But with only 40 teams, what was the point of buying it it when you could just fire up FIFA 98, edit some kits and enjoy much the same experience?
To get non-FIFA fans up to speed on just how crazy this was, it’s like NBA 2K18 shipping on four blu-rays, or the next MLB game deciding to include the entire Japanese and Korean pro leagues, just for one year, just for the hell of it.
This kind of thing just isn’t supposed to happen with sports games, because it gives fans everything they need to not buy your game the next year. Yet here we have, for one beautiful year, EA sports giving away the keys to the kingdom. Amongst the blur of year-to-year releases, FIFA 98’s largesse looms large like no other sports game’s inclusions ever have.
But it’s not just the excess content that’s helped FIFA 98 endure. Quantity would be nothing without quality, and the game includes several other series favourites, from the humble free kick arrow (still somehow superior to anything EA comes up with these days) to the ability to slide tackle a goalkeeper and get instantly sent off, which despite its punishment ranks as one of the most cathartic moves in all of video games.
Then there’s the matter of the game’s soundtrack, beginning with its intro, perhaps the most iconic in sports game history:
Don’t let Blur’s cameo overshadow the game’s real musical hook, though, which is the fact much of the menu music was provided by The Crystal Method:
Sports games using popular music is nothing new today, but in 1997 it was a coup for FIFA (for reference, check out FIFA 97’s tragic attempts at hip-hop and rock). Indeed, you could trace the series’ current place on the pop culture landscape back to FIFA 98 and its soundtrack, which dared to suggest that, hey, maybe these sports video games can be cool.
In a world where sports games are and always have been seen as disposable, FIFA 98 stands apart. By including so many teams across such a breadth of competition, and allowing for such a degree of customisation, people were able to dig in and play it not just throughout 1997, but well into the next few years as well.
Even today, when the FIFA series is known as much for its licensing as it is its football and has over 20 years of experience under its belt, you’ll find fans still talking about FIFA 98 in reverent tones. Amazing what some decent music, tiny teams and the ability to let try and murder a goalkeeper will do to a fanbase…
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La Liga, Spain’s top flight of professional football and home to some of the world’s biggest clubs—like Barcelona and Real Madrid—has signed a new sponsorship deal that sees its previous branding (“La Liga Santander”) swapped out, with the league now to be known as LALIGA EA SPORTS.
Which is all well and good for everyone involved, I’m sure hands have been shaken and money exchanged, but this isn’t a business press release website. I don’t really care what the top flight is called, and EA Sports have been sponsoring big european football leagues for years in one way or another (they’ve got multiple deals with the Premier League, for example, including appearing on referee’s uniforms).
No, I’m here to talk to you about the second division’s rebrand. Known either as La Liga 2 or Segunda División, depending on where you’re from, it’ll now be called (again, their caps, not mine) LALIGA HYPERMOTION.
Hypermotion, for those who haven’t had to read the bullet points of sports game press releases for the past few years, is a system EA cooked up to try and sell FIFA where they combined 11v11 motion capture with machine learning to try and improve the physics and animation of the players in the game.
That’s what a whole league is now named after. Not a video game company, not even a video game, just a physics and animation system designed for a single video game series where the benefits it brings are negligible at best (it’s mostly just empty PR calories, FIFA hasn’t fundamentally changed the way it plays or looks for years).
Of course nobody on the streets will actually call it that, everyone will still just call it La Liga 2 or whatever they’ve been calling it forever, but still. I’m very much looking forward to EA expanding these types of sponsorships, when next season’s Championship will be renamed to THE FROSTBITE LEAGUE.
EA Sports and Nike announced yesterday that, at some point in the “future”, games like FIFA and Madden will feature integration with .Swoosh, which Nike describes as its “new digital community experience”.
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Despite this, and a wider public reaction to the concept that landed somewhere between ambivalence and condemnation, there are still some companies willing to stick it out. Partly because they’ve got one eye on the future, and also maybe because they signed a bunch of contracts in 2021 and now have to see them through.
Nike Virtual Studios and EA SPORTS are today announcing a new partnership aimed at enhancing and personalizing the virtual sports experience for fans all over the world. This collaboration brings together two of the biggest names in sport and entertainment and will lead to all new ways for members of .SWOOSH, Nike’s new digital community experience, and EA SPORTS fans to express their personal style through play.
What’s funniest about the announcement, perhaps, is that even Nike and EA are embarrassed by (or intentionally obfuscating, you pick!) the truth, which is why you won’t find mention of the term NFT in the news, or even a reference to Web3. Instead EA simply says the partnership will make “.SWOOSH virtual creations available allowing members and players unique new opportunities for self-expression and creativity through sport and style.”
EA Sports games offer that already, of course, sometimes in the form of free unlocks, others that you have to pay for using in-game (or real-world) currency.
For the second time in two years, things in the Battlefield community—or at least the worst elements of it—have gotten so toxic that it has led to some pretty stern requests for people to get a grip and cut it out.
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It’s an understatement when we say that this subreddit has grown incredibly toxic. It’s near impossible to have a simple discussion without insults being flung around at each other—and it’s really starting to harm the entire Battlefield community, and each of us that are part of it. […] The mods have an obligation to follow the rules set out by Reddit, and if we are found to be in breach of not enforcing them, or doing a poor job at enforcing them, we risk the community getting banned altogether.
Now, a year later, the developers of the games themselves have taken to social media with a statement—co-signed by all four Battlefield studios—saying “we have witnessed increased harassment towards members of our development team”, and that “we will take appropriate action” against players found to not be adhering to the series’ community guidelines:
Recently we have witnessed increased harassment towards members of our development team.
Across all of our Battlefield Studios we are open to constructive feedback and criticism about our games.
But to maintain a healthy and open dialogue with our community, we will protect our teams and people from toxicity and harassment. We believe this has no place inside our game or within the Battlefield community.
We want to remind our players that through our EA User Agreement and Battlefield Community Guidelines we will take appropriate action to uphold these values.
As a community, we play the objective, together.
I get it, Battlefield fans have been through the wringer in recent years! Every time the series changes direction parts of the fanbase get upset, and I don’t think anyone would say that Battlefield 2042 launched in a fit and proper state.
That should be a good thing! But no, this is the internet, and this is the video games corner of the internet, so of course there must be people who are angry, all the time, and like always they’re getting angry at the wrong people. Battlefield 2042 was rushed out the door to hit a fiscal objective in the middle of a pandemic by the people running EA, not the level designers and artists and community managers working at DICE.
I’m glad this statement uses such supportive (of their teams) and forceful language; if someone is dumb and hateful enough to be harassing the developers of a video game, for whatever reason, then that person isn’t going to be fun to play multiplayer video games with, or against.
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