Battlefield 2042 is one of the most controversial games under EA’s belt. Considering the company has many of these touchy-subject titles, this is saying a lot. The game’s launch wasn’t great at all and it has forced EA Games to reconsider how it approaches game development in the future. Even some Battlefield 2042 devs have been harassed online by angry fans. So much so that EA had to issue a statement about it.
But the failure of Battlefield 2042 also caused the death of Battlefield Mobile. EA announced earlier this year that the company was pulling the plug on the mobile game which was set to deliver a Battlefield experience on the go. It was already quite far into development with alpha testing taking place before its cancellation.
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Battlefield Mobile was in development at Industrial Toys but after its cancellation, the studio was forced to close its doors.
Speaking about the unfortunate set of events, Alex Seropian, who co-founded Bungie back in 1991 and opened up Industrial Toys in 2012, says that the overwhelmingly negative response to Battlefield 2042 forced EA to cancel the mobile game.
He says that Battlefield Mobile was gearing up to release in late 2022. It had an open beta running in five countries by the end of November and just a few months later, Industrial Toys shut down in January 2023.
“At the beginning all the wind in the universe was in the sails of the SS Battlefield Mobile: the genre is growing, it’s a great IP, we’ve got a great team – all this was super good. In the course of the last year, a few things happened. Battlefield 2042 came out, and the community reaction to 2042 was not good. That cascaded a bunch of introspection. Apple also changed the IDFA rules, and the long and short of it is that it’s made user acquisition a lot more expensive. So organics eroded away with 2042’s release, and paid distribution got an order of magnitude more expensive because of the IDFA rules.”
Seropian claims that Apple’s IDFA rules were a large contributor to the cancellation of Apex Legends Mobile. He then says that EA wasn’t willing to commit the extra resources to see either of the games complete development.
“We did our soft launch, which was going well, but it’s like, okay – to get to the finish line we’re gonna need this much time and this much money to get to global. I think there’s also the trend right now for big mobile games and big IPs to take a franchise swing – to think of mobile as another platform for the franchise, there’s one big release and everything is consistent across all these platforms. Our approach was the opposite, it was a bespoke experience for mobile, because the way people use these devices and play and everything is different. So all of those things sort of combined and I think that’s why you got that outcome. Nobody wanted that, but you know, the world changes and people react.”
At the moment, the future of the Battlefield series is unclear. There’s definitely no mobile game headed our way and we don’t even know how EA will tackle a possible sequel in the future.
Source: Mobilegamer.biz
