EA execs place blame for ‘Battlefield 2042’s’ failure

In a recent company meeting with employees, as reported by Xfire, EA executives attempted to explain the reasons behind the disastrous state of ‘Battlefield 2042’ as players abandon the game in droves and over 200,000 people sign a petition demanding refunds.

While acknowledging EA’s wider success, both past and present, Laura Miele, EA’s chief studios officer, said “it’s really important to acknowledge when we have misses.” She added that when it comes to Battlefield 2042’s launch, the company “failed to meet the expectations of our players, and also clearly missed our own expectations.” 

Miele went on to list all the things that supposedly contributed to the game’s failure, among those being the “huge ambitions for the project,” the aging Frostbite engine, the global pandemic, a “historic” amount of bugs and, surprisingly, the simultaneous launch of ‘Halo Infinite’s’ multiplayer mode.

She noted that while EA received a lot of backlash from players regarding bugs and unpolished areas of the experience, there was also a lot of positive feedback, adding that after the game’s launch and Day 1 patch “the game was stable” and “the early critical reception was good.”

But then, according to Miele, the game was affected by the launch of ‘Halo Infinite’s’ multiplayer mode, which apparently drew unfavorable comparisons because players perceived ‘Halo’ as very polished, while ‘Battlefield 2042’ was littered with bugs and some determined it to be unplayable. 

Critics have deemed this comparison as EA executives grasping at straws, considering that ‘Halo Infinite’ had its own fair share of criticisms from the gaming community, and it’s hard to imagine it was that much of a contributing factor to the abysmal state in which ‘Battlefield 2042’ launched.

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Miele also briefly mentioned the poor game design choices, lack of a scoreboard, no voice chat and the dreaded Specialist system as reasons for the failure, but EA has already said it would address those issues in a future update.

While the list of reasons for ‘Battlefield 2042’s’ failure seems to be quite extensive, it oddly doesn’t mention any shortcomings by EA executives, which a number of fans blame for the game’s disastrous state, considering that many of the issues brought up in the meeting were known about for months before the game’s release, yet it seems none of them have been addressed.

While EA tries to figure out what went wrong and how to fix ‘Battlefield 2042,’ the players’ patience seems to be running thin. The game has been out for three months at this point and gamers are already abandoning it in droves, especially after it was announced that all new content for the rather featureless game would be pushed back till summer. 

There is now also an online petition signed by over 200,000 people, demanding all players be eligible for a refund of the game which they describe as “a mockery of every customer who purchased this video game for $70 due to EA’s false advertising.”