EA has reported disappointing sales of Battlefield 5 in the third quarter of its 2019 fiscal year. The publisher added that the game did perform to the expectations and that it didn’t execute to strategies that were expected.
There were a lot of expectations for the game to be bought more by players in the holiday season. The game sold 7.3 million units in the time between the launch and the end of the year. This number was 1 million short of what EA had projected.
CEO Andrew Wilson has explained why the sales did not perform, partly because of the delays and the decision to include a single-player campaign rather than a battle royale mode at launch.
The delay of the launch caused the game to come out in November, which was already crowded with a lot of games coming out that month.
We made some decisions on launch timing and key features of this game that we felt would improve the quality of the experience
For context, Battlefield 5 was designed from the beginning to offer a long-term live service. In August, we determined that we needed some more time for final adjustments to the core gameplay to fully deliver on the potential of the live service, so we moved the ship date to November to accommodate those goals.
Unfortunately, the later release date meant the game launched deeper into a competitive holiday window where heavy price discounting was a big factor. In addition, we also made the decision to prioritize other features, including a single-player experience, at launch over a multiplayer mode.
This year, battle royale modes became incredibly popular in shooter games. As a result of these decisions, we struggled to gain momentum and we did not met our sales expectations for the quarter.
Q3 was a difficult quarter for Electronic Arts and we did not perform to our expectations. We are now applying the strengths of our company to sharpen our execution and focus on delivering great new games and long-term live services for our players.
Battlefield 5’s battle royale mode has still not launched, but is expected to release sometime next month in March.
Have you played Battlefied 5? Let us know in the comments below and tell us what you think of its single player campaign mode.
