Battlefield games are 'two year projects'

Electronic Arts has avoided annualizing the Battlefield series, in spite of the success Activision has had with the Call of Duty franchise. EA CFO Blake Jorgensen pointed out the many reasons why the company doesn't believe that's a smart decision for them.

15

Electronic Arts has avoided annualizing the Battlefield series, in spite of the success Activision has had with the Call of Duty franchise. EA CFO Blake Jorgensen pointed out the many reasons why the company doesn't believe that's a smart decision for them.

"It's a two year project," he said, pointing out that "Battlefield takes us about two years to develop." Indeed, two years separate Battlefield 3 and 4. However, he also added that "Battlefield is a product that doesn't just sell once; it sells for 24 months associated with not just Battlefield, but all the additional Battlefield Premium activities that the consumer wants."

"You've got to be careful that you don't destroy some of that tail that is on the Battlefield product," he told investors at the UBS Global Technology Conference (via Gamespot).

Of course, another reason you want to avoid annualizing a series is "you also want to be really careful that you don't destroy the franchise along the way. You've got to make it exciting and different." It's an interesting statement, given that outside of Battlefield, EA is quite masterful at the art of the annual release.

Andrew Yoon was previously a games journalist creating content at Shacknews.

From The Chatty
  • reply
    November 20, 2013 4:00 PM

    Andrew Yoon posted a new article, Battlefield games are 'two year projects'.

    Electronic Arts has avoided annualizing the Battlefield series, in spite of the success Activision has had with the Call of Duty franchise. EA CFO Blake Jorgensen pointed out the many reasons why the company doesn't believe that's a smart decision for them.

    • reply
      November 20, 2013 4:31 PM

      The #1 reason should be the crashy fucked-up state BF3 and BF4 launched in. :/

      • reply
        November 20, 2013 4:51 PM

        I thought BF3 launched surprisingly fine. Course I am just one case. I didn't hear too many people complain about BF3's launch state (at least by comparative volume to BF4's)

        • reply
          November 20, 2013 4:57 PM

          [deleted]

          • reply
            November 20, 2013 5:06 PM

            I still crash. I regularly here, "screen-locked" in teamspeak too. Nvidia, AMD, Intel, W7, W8 - BF4 seems to strive in providing users a consistent experience across a variety of configurations.

          • reply
            November 20, 2013 6:22 PM

            [deleted]

          • reply
            November 20, 2013 7:43 PM

            no the netcode is basically broken right now. they patched it and made it worse... the servers start to desync with the clients due to destruction and levolution... its fucking annoying. test your aim as the map goes on for longer, shit gets really weird.

            or go on test range and blow a bunch of shit up. then retest shooting the target dummies and watch how its desynced.

          • reply
            November 20, 2013 10:04 PM

            They did: the open beta was several weeks long. Yet, they didn't manage to use the collected data to track down all the bugs that cause the crashes. :(

        • reply
          November 20, 2013 5:08 PM

          BF3 certainly had it's share of launch problems but I think you hear more about BF4's because they certainly have much larger issues. They really should have held off and fixed bugs for at least a month or more before release. It wouldn't have hurt them nearly as badly as all the negative press surrounding the current fairly broken state it's in now.

        • reply
          November 20, 2013 6:14 PM

          People complained about BF3 launch but it was mostly over the gameplay changes than technical problems. BF4 launch is mostly mired by the technical issues that still aren't resolved.

          • reply
            November 20, 2013 7:52 PM

            Lol, I cannot accept revives because I have rebound the default keys. Normally the revive auto declines for some unknown reason (even if the medic survives). I just had a round where I could neither accept the revive, decline the revive, nor suicide resulting in me having to leave the server. I think I'm done with this game until the next client patch.

            • reply
              November 20, 2013 8:09 PM

              Did you use the BF4 editor from reddit?

              • reply
                November 20, 2013 8:35 PM

                I don't know about reddit, but I used the realmware config editor.

              • reply
                November 20, 2013 8:40 PM

                I used the config editor from realmware. No idea if that was on Reddit.

        • reply
          November 20, 2013 8:12 PM

          The worst thing I remember about BF3 early on was how unstable Battlelog was. BF4 on the other hand Battlelog has been pretty much flawless at launch minus the 100 friend limit. The game wasn't that crashy for me but I did lose sound every now and then as well as disconnects from servers.

      • reply
        November 20, 2013 5:01 PM

        If they did annual releases we'd be getting a product that's pre-alpha :p

    • reply
      November 20, 2013 5:31 PM

      They tried to ping-pong with MoH for a couple cycles I thought?

    • reply
      November 20, 2013 6:43 PM

      I like this. I hate the annualisation and oversaturation of many series. I got caught up in the COD hype for a couple of years, but there was so little actual difference between them that I havent bought a COD since (what was the Vietnam one?)

    • reply
      November 20, 2013 8:22 PM

      [deleted]

    • reply
      November 20, 2013 8:35 PM

      They're actually three year projects, but they release in two.

    • reply
      November 20, 2013 10:12 PM

      Not sure what they're talking about since they've been releasing yearly for the last decade. 2012 was probably the only year where they didn't have a new BF game out and even then they had tons of BF3 DLC.

      • reply
        November 21, 2013 2:51 AM

        Also cod is developed by two teams and each is on a two year cycle so the whole thing is stupid.

    • reply
      November 21, 2013 4:07 AM

      You mean "two-year projects"?

      "Two year projects" means two 1-year projects.

Hello, Meet Lola