Battlefield V was probably the most silent release this year for an AAA title and was a point of controversy for a period of time after its release last month. Some said that it was a fake, non-genuine representation of WWII, and others complained about no content at launch. The game didn’t sell as many copies as projected.
Battlefield V sold about 14M units on console and PC combined, which may seem like a lot, but it’s down from Battlefield 1 which sold about 15M units. On the console, the game bombed due to many other games coming out at the same time like Red Dead Redemption 2, Black Ops 4, and Fallout 76, which even toppled the WWII shooter on consoles reports SuperData.
Fallout 76 sold 1.4M digital units and didn’t make the top ten selling PC games during its release month. Digital sales are down overall by 1% from 2017 with a total spent of $9.05B. This is just a tad lower than last year’s sales in digital spend.
Another example is Rainbow Six: Siege. Ubisoft had a decent run this year with a lot of DLC releases but had a huge decline last month. A whopping 33% drop after a small drop the month before.
Destiny 2’s Forsaken expansion was launched in September and has now already halted and gone flat. Player “engagement” has dropped down back to pre-Forsaken rates and SuperData projets that DLC has dropped 63% from 2017.
EA has hit a 52-week low in shares, mainly due to BF: V’s sales. Patrick Söderlund, EA’s chief design officer, said the following to address the negative remarks about the game:
These are people who are uneducated—they don’t understand that this is a plausible scenario, and listen: this is a game… There are a lot of female people who want to play, and male players who want to play as a badass [woman]… We stand up for the cause, because I think those people who don’t understand it, well, you have two choices: either accept it or don’t buy the game.
Battlefield V can easily be found for more than 50% off at select retailers, which is following a path similar to Fallout 76. EA’s 2019 projects that their $2.2B revenue will drop to $1.8B based on their current trends.
At this point, we could say that some games did worse than others due to timing, but when you consider the aggregate spending overall, there’s a slight decline in digital games spending compared to 2017. Perhaps this is due to other games that are free-to-play with a microtransaction model, like Fortnite taking a piece of the cake. The console version was released around the same time as the AAA games.
Source: TechRaptor.
Writer and journalist for almost a year. Doing this for fun. Learned a lot along the way. I’m interested in businesses and the moves they make, tech and how it changes the world, and of course, enjoy playing some video games! I enjoy console and PC, but mostly RPGs, FPS, and League of Legends.