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Battlefield 5's Poor Sales Numbers Have Become a Disaster For Electronic Arts (seekingalpha.com) 715

dryriver writes: Electronic Arts has mismanaged the Battlefield franchise in the past -- BF3 and BF4 were not great from a gameplay perspective -- but with Battlefield 5, Electronic Arts is facing a real disaster that has sent its stock plummeting on the stock exchanges. First came the fierce cultural internet backlash from gamers to the Battlefield 5 reveal trailer -- EA tried to inject so much 21st Century gender diversity and Hollywood action-movie style fighting into what was supposed to be a reasonably historically accurate WWII shooter trailer, that many gamers felt the game would be "a seriously inauthentic portrayal of what WW2 warfare really was like." Then the game sold very poorly after a delayed launch date -- far less than the mildly successful WW1 shooter Battlefield 1 for example -- and is currently discounted by 33% to 50% at all major game retailers to try desperately to push sales numbers up. This was also a disaster for Nvidia, as Battlefield 5 was the tentpole title supposed to entice gamers into buying expensive new realtime ray-tracing Nvidia 2080 RTX GPUs.

Electronic Arts had to revise its earnings estimates for 2019, some hedge funds sold off their EA stock, fearing low sales and stiff competition from popular Battle Royal games like Fortnite and PUBG, and EA stock is currently 45% down from its peak value in July 2018. EA had already become seriously unpopular with gamers because of annoying Battlefield franchise in-game mechanisms such as heaving to buy decent-aiming-accuracy weapons with additional cash, having to constantly pay for additional DLC content and game maps, and the very poor multiplayer gameplay of its two Star Wars: Battlefront titles (essentially Battlefield with laser blasters set in the Star Wars Universe). It seems that with Battlefield 5, EA -- not a company known for listening to its customers -- finally hit a brick wall, in the form of many Battlefield fans simply not buying or playing Battlefield 5.

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Battlefield 5's Poor Sales Numbers Have Become a Disaster For Electronic Arts

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  • by Kohlrabi82 ( 1672654 ) on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:10AM (#57957426)

    Catering to the perpetually offended instead of your loyal gamer fanbase did not work out for you, EA? How surprising.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:13AM (#57957434)

      Or, you know... it's just not a very good game. Couldn't have anything to do with it, though, no - it's just those SJWs getting their just desserts! Of course!

      • by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:34AM (#57957472)

        Or you know... life is more complicated than that and for a variety reasons such as being a shitty game or bf3/4 being meh or the dumb ass sjw crap the consumer made a decision not to consume.

        But no, it has to be black n white and only for the one reason that matches your world view. Right.

        Be a dear, wipe your face, wash your hands and set the table for dinner.

      • by Rockoon ( 1252108 ) on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:52AM (#57957500)
        It may not be a good game because of catering to the perpetually offended.

        There is one fact I know: If you cater to the people that arent your customers at the expense of your customers, then you will absolutely lose customers, and the people you catered to will move on to fuck with something else.
        • by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Monday January 14, 2019 @10:15AM (#57958904)

          It may not be a good game because of catering to the perpetually offended. There is one fact I know: If you cater to the people that aren't your customers at the expense of your customers, then you will absolutely lose customers, and the people you catered to will move on to fuck with something else.

          This has been learned the hard way in more than just EA's case. The destruction of the Star Wars golden goose by Kennedy and Johnson. Especially when they not only refused criticism, they attacked and ridiculed anyone who disagreed with them.

          How'd that work out?

          In the world of entertainment, it is pretty important that you produce entertainment that your customers want.

          And if you produce a game based on a event like WW2, it needs to be accurate, because the customer is pretty well versed.

          And yeah - an alternative universe WW2 game could be made. And as long as it's known as an alternative game, its all good.

          But speaking to that - you get interesting things when you cater to those people. The latest Wonder Woman movie which did indeed have a war setting, which did indeed have social Justice oversight - still outraged some of the easily offended.

          They were outraged that Gal Gadot raised her arm - and horrors!!! To Twitter and scream!! Wonder Woman Gal Gadot had no armpit hair!! https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/... [huffingtonpost.ca]

          What is worse, Wonder woman as a member of an immortal race of only women could not give true consent, therefore she was raped!!! https://slate.com/human-intere... [slate.com]

          The point is good people, if you are dealing with a group who cannot be satisfied, there is no point in dealing with them at all.

      • by Mashiki ( 184564 ) <mashiki@gm a i l .com> on Monday January 14, 2019 @03:20AM (#57957552) Homepage

        Or, you know... it's just not a very good game. Couldn't have anything to do with it, though, no - it's just those SJWs getting their just desserts! Of course!

        No, they went out and catered to the SJW's then told people that "if they didn't like the agenda. To not buy it." [vg247.com] So it looks like people didn't buy it. Then the guy who pushed it "left" the company. [gematsu.com] No no, it wasn't telling people to fuck off that cratered sales. It was just a bad game...or a combination of it was a bad game and telling their market to fuck off.

      • by mjwx ( 966435 ) on Monday January 14, 2019 @09:25AM (#57958608)

        Or, you know... it's just not a very good game. Couldn't have anything to do with it, though, no - it's just those SJWs getting their just desserts! Of course!

        I found that out after Battlefield 3. The gameplay had been removed and replaced with a grind system that ensured as long as you played for long enough you got the upgrades to make you unstoppable. It stopped being a game where skill mattered and all you needed to do was suck long enough to unlock the upgrades.

        But facts won't stop the morons bleating "SJW".

    • by Anonymous Coward

      EA bought DICE, the scandanavian ENGINE company, back when it seemed their work was good. The EA turned over most of their other IPs to this increasingly awful engine. Worse, being scandanavian, DICE is sjw to the power infinity.

      Anyway EA combined the complete lack of game play design skills exhibited by DICE (DICE's Mirror's Edge 2 was a critical and technical disaster) with the whole lootbox/microtransaction 'gaming as a service' nonsense to create a perfect storm of fail.

      BF V, initially stripped of lootb

      • by Kokuyo ( 549451 ) on Monday January 14, 2019 @03:48AM (#57957642) Journal

        " And having the voice of women screeching and screaming as they kill and die in every online game was a psychological idiocy beyond words."

        No shit!

        Men are hardcoded to want to protect females. SJWs think that's a bad thing because this is triggered more the more feminine a female is. The war against femininity and beauty is very openly fought among those people...

        And then you want to sell a game that is primarily directed at males (because females aren't interested in war... even the suffragettes were fighting for a right to vote for females without being under threat of a draft... women are not dumb enough to want to go to war) and fill it up with deus ex machina female characters who can do all that men can even though they have way less muscle mass that is way less efficient than men's.

        Meanwhile, you get to hear them dying around you, which triggers very different feelings of failure in men than hearing males perish.

        Who could have foreseen that THAT would not sell?!

        The worst and most blatant sign of total incompetence is the way they portrayed females in wars. There have been many examples of tried and true female war heroes. There was no need to embellish (and implying that women need embellishment to have a place in the scenario).

        I don't know about the US, but god damn it, the French Resistance was full of women, wasn't it? What about Russian sharpshooters and nightwitches?

        It is not hard to find examples of capable women in war. They are so easy to find, in fact, that there are memes about them! To not work with that is either an unrealistic amount of stupidity or done on purpose.

        • Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)

          by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

          I would like to add that there being memes also is kinda strange since the memeing community is getting more and more chauvinistic in response to the SJW pressure on society.

          And STILL these women receive laudation from that camp. Let that sink in for a moment...

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          In ancient history between roughly 600 and 1000, samurai in Japan went to war as couples, as husband and wife.

      • by dunkelfalke ( 91624 ) on Monday January 14, 2019 @04:28AM (#57957708)

        Come on, DICE can make awesome games. Take Pinball Fantasies for example. The problem is clearly EA.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 )

      Catering to the perpetually offended instead of your loyal gamer fanbase did not work out for you, EA? How surprising.

      This! There is a saying - Get Woke, Go Broke. It's real, at least for the 21st century version of woke, which for all of it's presumed "inclusiveness" is really just racism and sexism directed at a different target.

      And unfortunately the target the social justice people are demanding these companies to go after is the very market that buys and plays games. When surrendering to their demand for whatever they are offended by today, you only get the privilege of getting targeted by what offends them tomorrow.

    • by Z80a ( 971949 ) on Monday January 14, 2019 @10:35AM (#57959040)

      The problem is not catering for em, its hiring em.
      Because as soon they're in, they will get offended by everyone with talent in the studio and try their best to get em fired and replaced by more people of the same religion.

  • by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:11AM (#57957430)

    ... and practices are coming back at them."

    FTFY

  • by jools33 ( 252092 ) on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:28AM (#57957464)

    Nvidia's problem wasn't the tie in with Battlefield, more so the pricing, if you decide to add 30% to the price, expect sales to not be quite so hot.

    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:45AM (#57957486)

      If anything, nvidia got used to the cryptoboom pricing. It almost seems like people up top the company convinced themselves that those prices were the new normal.

      And this has been a harsh wake up call. They price RTX cards as if they're the hottest cryptomining kit that gamers would have to compete with miners for, as happened with many of the GTX series cards.

      • And this has been a harsh wake up call. They price RTX cards as if they're the hottest cryptomining kit that gamers would have to compete with miners for, as happened with many of the GTX series cards.

        Everyone seems to have forgotten about deep learning too. Deep learning is big and getting bigger. The bloody miners nabbed all the best cards and it's been hard to get anything decent. Recently, Dell RAN OUT of 2080 Ti's and literally conldn't supply a machine with one.

        • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

          The bloody miners nabbed all the best cards and it's been hard to get anything decent. Recently, Dell RAN OUT of 2080 Ti's and literally conldn't supply a machine with one.

          You mean it has nothing to do with the fact that nvidia was all-in on the crypto mining market, misread it, are sitting on assloads of devalued GPU's and OEM-PCB's, that were optimized for mining. And they were so all in that they cut GPU's to non-reference makers like evga, msi, and asus. And with multiple shareholder lawsuits, and prior to the holidays their stock had dropped 49% that they're trying to recoup lost valuation prior to the end of the 2018 fiscal year and show shareholders that "they really

  • Zeitgeist Market (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mentil ( 1748130 ) on Monday January 14, 2019 @03:17AM (#57957546)

    Marketing no longer has a stranglehold on the zeitgeist. Free/cheap multiplayer games are in at the moment; why pay $60 to play that new game some people are playing, when you can pay $0-$30 to play that game everyone's playing? It's like the WoW network effects, only if it were F2P. There were plenty of comparable F2P MMORPGs but they never rose to the prominence of WoW.

    Another interpretation is that gamers are burned out on cinematic FPSes or deathmatch. Remember when Horde Mode was all the rage a few years back? Battle Royale is the same. If anything, this is proof that graphics don't automatically sell games. If this translates into publishers no longer thinking of shooters as a 'safe bet' then I see that as a good thing, as they are a huge portion of AAA action games.

    • Re:Zeitgeist Market (Score:4, Interesting)

      by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Monday January 14, 2019 @05:18AM (#57957840) Journal
      Maybe. Though I think that the network effect plays a much bigger role in an MMO, where people are much more socially invested in the game than in a casual shooter with short rounds and little if any social interaction. Total number of player also matters a lot more for MMOs, where insufficiently populated shards tend do die out. In games like BF or Fortnite, you can basically grab the next 24-64 players off the global queue and populate a game with them (doesn't work quite like that, but it almost amounts to the same thing).

      What brought Fortnite to prominence is not a network effect, but word of mouth about a really fun F2P game. Not the same thing.
  • by slashmydots ( 2189826 ) on Monday January 14, 2019 @03:32AM (#57957598)
    He literally said if you don't like the inclusion of a woman with disabilities (very inaccurately) on the front line then you're ignorant and shouldn't buy the game. So nobody bought the game and he took a big bonus and quit. They also added in mission where the French are seen as racist against black people, which is completely and utterly inaccurate to those two groups actually working together during the war. Then they took a special ops mission and replaced the actual heroes with women and claimed it was historically accurate. This disgraceful lunacy in the twisted version of reality that these SJW assholes live in is so vast it can crash and entire project/company/product. Every SJW and far left liberal nut job needs to lose their job after this wonderful public display of how crazy these people are.
    • by NettiWelho ( 1147351 ) on Monday January 14, 2019 @04:15AM (#57957682)

      a woman with disabilities

      The lady in trailer is not disabled, thats not a prosthethic as WW2 era prosthethics can't do things like reload a bolt-action rifle, machine gun or artillery piece.

      That lady is cybernetically enhanced . Too bad its not a cyberpunk game.

    • for not getting the finished game out in time. Half the modes are missing and there's not a lot of reason to stop playing BF1. Also they're the first to market with ray tracing which probably took a lot of development time away right at the end, but then that tech turned out to be a dud with $1000 cards that struggle to maintain 60 fps at 1080p with the feature turned on.

      Far Cry 5 showed that if the games good gamers will buy it anyway, controversy be damned.
      • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

        Far Cry 5 showed that if the games good gamers will buy it anyway, controversy be damned.

        FC5 is a rather poor example, even though the gaming press tried to tank it several times, finally giving up. Kingdom Come: Deliverance would be a far better example. The mainstream gaming sites? Kotaku('gamers want to keep medieval games white!' Polygon(blahblah misogyny, gamers want to keep it white!') Giant Bomb(we refuse to review it!) and so on. A title that was attacked by SJWs for having white characters, not being diverse, rampant complaints of misogyny, was blacklisted by other members of the g

  • by Jarwulf ( 530523 ) on Monday January 14, 2019 @03:47AM (#57957640)
    It doesn't make sense on the surface. Its not like purple haired womyn's studies majors are a sizable demographic for FPSs. Its bizarre how so many companies like outdoors stores, comics, and gaming that are do not have SJWs anywhere near their target audience are so obsessed with currying their favor that they're willing to lose out on billions and antagonize their actual core audience. Then you realize this is a religious ideology to them. Theres now a sizable number of people in power who hold the philosophy..or religion of 'social justice' as strongly as the most zealous priest or mullah. They don't care about losing money anymore. They are completely unrepentant the usual corporate spin apology is now replaced with the company continuing to double down on blaming the fans. All that matters is spreading and putting the ideology into power. Looks like we've finally found the one thing corporations appear to love more than money and it seems to be bowing down in worship of SJWism.
    • Upper layer management are still sociopathic capitalists. They let the SJW run amock to keep the peace.

      If EA starts to perceive the costs of driving through a more traditional feel for the games to be less than the cost/churn of unhappy employees they'll do the former.

  • by AbRASiON ( 589899 ) * on Monday January 14, 2019 @04:36AM (#57957732) Journal

    The article is slightly off, in that itâ(TM)s implying that gamers took issue with EA misrepresenting women in historical battles.
    Well, look, some of them did, for sure.

    However, as usual, if I recall, the backlash was due to EA / DICE responding, effectively that anyone who takes issue with women in gaming, in any capacity is clearly a basement dweller, behind the times, gamergater or some other thing. (Something, to this effect, was said, if I recall correctly)

    So much like GameGate itself, what happens is some idiots shout and whine and then, in response to this, someone says something over the top, in a blanket generalisation kind of way, next thing you know, youâ(TM)ve pissed people off who actually werenâ(TM)t that bad. So begins divisiveness *(ie: skub vs anti-skub)

    So to go back on topic, /some/ people probably just said âoeGee, this seems a little historically inaccurate, why canâ(TM)t you just make the women in this be X, who were actually in the war and were badass!â And those guys (or even girls) were called chauvinists.

    This keeps on going on, on the internet, as much as it sucks to walk on eggshells, people continue to not be careful and end up inciting this kind of thing.

    Also, free âvirtual signalâ(TM) points for EA if they appeal to the far left crowd (ie, generally the journalists)

    A mess, as usual.
    Oh one last thing, worst of all really.

    1 game, getting bad sales numbers impacting the company this much? Someone needs to re-evaluate their budgeting!

  • I'm baffled (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 14, 2019 @05:21AM (#57957842)

    I really can't understand how people don't understand that getting woke is what got EA broke. I mean, if nothing else, they are the masters of rehashing old content and making it profitable. Look at FIFA. People buy this shit every single freaking year, paying full price for literally the same game with refreshed teams. Something that a patch should've done. Imagine if FIFA team adds mixed gender teams. Imagine for a second that FIFA 2020 has Real Madrid with both males and females and tell me if that game would sell like a hotcake or it would flop.

    This is what happened to Battlefield V. It could've easily reached the sales numbers of 3/4 or 1. But it didn't. Nowhere near close, and it's not because the game is not vastly different from Bf1.

    They'll probably recover and get those stock numbers up again with successful Anthem, it's their best people working on it. Bunch more FIFA releases and the shitshow that FUT is. But I hope they take this as a wake-up call. The same that the likes of Activision/Blizzard are taking right now, and they better start focusing on their core audience, or yet another game crash is coming upon us.

    Gaming can be the highest grossing form of entertainment, but it has to be done right. Look at Red Dead Redemption, or hell, the latest God of War. They didn't spend their time dealing with political correctness bull*, they targetted their core audience that keeps those titles in borderline religion sense, and it paid. Those 2 are the highest grossing games of 2018, if not all time. RDR at least is. And GoW is a platform exclusive, so a lot of gamers simply couldn't play it on their platform of choice. And it still sold freaking well.

  • by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Monday January 14, 2019 @05:41AM (#57957882)
    I don't believe that people didn't buy the game because people can choose a race / gender in multiplayer. More likely they didn't buy because the game feels stale and the ongoing belief that EA would rape players the way they had in the past.

    It wouldn't hurt if companies like EA, Activision et al suffered a backlash and financial shock for acting like greedy jerks. It might remind them that they're supposed to be producing games, not skinner boxes.

  • by gotan ( 60103 ) on Monday January 14, 2019 @06:43AM (#57958030) Homepage

    ... players wouldn't care about historical inaccuracies if it's due to an oversight or to benefit the game in some way. But if there is an inaccuracy willfully introduced in the game, then one may ask why. The answer in this case is: to take up the cause for diversity politics.

    And that's (in my opinion) what at least some gamers dislike: buying a product that force feeds you thinly disguised political propaganda. It's like in game advertising, only with politics: If you want to get away with it at least make it unobtrusive.

    But maybe the EA developers didn't want to be unobtrusive, maybe they wanted to make a blatant statement. In that case they should expect some opposition, especially on a subject as polarizing as the diversity agenda is.

    So it sparked a debate and probably factored in buying decisions for those undecided after considering more important aspects, like gameplay, pricing etc.

    If the game is as mediocre as seems to be the case, then maybe the developers should have put more effort in the game itself and less in the "correct" political message though.

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday January 14, 2019 @06:46AM (#57958040)
    but you know what, only about 10% of Call of Duty players [arstechnica.com] finish story mode. I couldn't find BF stats but I'm guessing it's the same (they're in the same genre and are basically the Mortal Kombat/Street Fighter of the military shooter world, discuss among yourselves which is MK and which is SF).

    The sales suck because:

    1. It went up against Rockstar's Red Dead. Everybody was gonna take a bath this year no matter what. It's like when a new Elder Scrolls comes out, there's only so many hours in the day and everybody is busy playing that.
    2. The game's unfinished (it's missing half it's modes) so folks are playing BF1, which was $5 bucks on Origin recently. I'm guessing the last minute push to put Ray Tracing in is to blame.

    There's no such thing as bad publicity. Far Cry 5 had similar controversy and managed to be the best selling Far Cry in history. Gamers will put their dislikes and politics aside if you bring a good game. But if you bring a mediocre one while they're 50 hours into a 200 Red Dead play through expect to get hosed.

    On the plus side no Rockstar games in 2019 (I'm not a fan of Red Dead & GTA) so there's a ton of great games coming out. The rest of the game industry noticed a new Rockstar game and planned their releases accordingly, but that doesn't work for annual & bi-annual franchises. You can't risk your player base getting out of the habit of buying this years release. Hell, if the community should be mad it's about that crap.
  • by Computershack ( 1143409 ) on Monday January 14, 2019 @07:00AM (#57958072)
    Unfortunately most of the damage has been down to people shit talking the game before it even came out and then continuing, the majority of whom have never ever played it but are merely regurgitating comments made by others. A lot of the videos on Youtube which were apparently "reviews" didn't contain the reviewer playing it but merely showed clips of gameplay mostly from promo videos. Fortunately for me I'm old enough to ignore such bollocks from people who would never get a job reviewing a turd in the real world and I'm glad I did because I enjoy playing the game.
    • Unfortunately most of the damage has been down to people shit talking the game before it even came out and then continuing, the majority of whom have never ever played it but are merely regurgitating comments made by others.

      If you cannot trust the game devs whos word can you trust? The following picture was tweeted out by devs and is completely unaltered: https://i.imgur.com/Yu2ms5k.jp... [imgur.com]
      Also those are not just their opinions, they included their personal biases into the game as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lives... [reddit.com]

  • by AHuxley ( 892839 ) on Monday January 14, 2019 @08:09AM (#57958268) Journal
    Remember who is going to be buying the game.
    What the users expect to play during a game sold as been historic.
    When a game is set in a historic setting don't add large amounts unexpected of pure fantasy.
    A fantasy game can be sold as a fantasy game.
    A game promoted to be about history, sell the content as such.
    Always listen to your fans and reviewers. Be nice to all reviewers and fans.
    They are the real people with money who will be buying and promoting the game.

    Get the talked about CPU and GPU support correct before selling a game.
  • by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Monday January 14, 2019 @08:44AM (#57958420)

    ... about wether a game is catering to diversity or social justice or not. Absolutely positively no one at all. People do care if it's a good game or not. And my assumption, knowing EA, is that it's probably a shitty and utterly pointless game. For all I care EA along with today's ActiJizz can go die in a fire and I figure most games think the same of today's triple A industry.

  • by Pyramid ( 57001 ) on Monday January 14, 2019 @09:17AM (#57958548)

    Too bad it was utterly impossible to predict this would happen...

  • by Hadlock ( 143607 ) on Monday January 14, 2019 @12:11PM (#57959784) Homepage Journal

    I ran a series of very popular Bad Company 2, Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4 servers for four years, we had a pretty complex signup process (used both steam and origin systems, as steam had a better event popup system) and still had over 3500 people sign up... for Battlefield 3 we had the #2 most popular server according to gametracker (cantaloupe island). I would qualify as one of the most dedicated fans of the series, perhaps.
     
    Did not buy Battlefield 1 until a couple weeks before BF5 was supposed to come out, Battlefield 1 gameplay was so awful that I never bothered to keep track of when BF5 was eventually released. I never bought Battlefield 5. Also there's the whole problem of having to know which version of Battlefield 5 to buy that will have all the map packs built in from the beginning. I just don't have time for that anymore. I even bought a new gaming laptop before it came out, but.... changing release dates and spending time looking up which versions actually ship with all the maps... not worth it. I might buy BF5 in a couple months when all the bugs have been worked out and maps have been released. Maybe.

  • by urbanriot ( 924981 ) on Monday January 14, 2019 @12:45PM (#57960026)
    Prior to release, concerning the game's backlash re: historical accuracy with so much inclusivity, from Wikipedia, "EA chief creative officer Patrick SÃderlund said the developer was uninterested in taking flak for diversifying the gaming space. "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," he said."

    From this Slashdot post's summary at the end, "It seems that with Battlefield 5, EA -- not a company known for listening to its customers -- finally hit a brick wall, in the form of many Battlefield fans simply not buying or playing Battlefield 5."

    ... maybe now EA will start listening?
  • by irp ( 260932 ) on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:31PM (#57960916)

    I loved BF2. Played it until they closed the servers.

    BF2 was primitive with today's standards (and the plane/choppers was difficult to use and FAR too powerful in the hands of those who mastered them!).

    Its strength - in my opinion - was a nice balance between being sufficiently slow paced that you could act strategically, while still have enough close quarters action that it wasn't boring. The snipers worked well. They were annoying but not that dangerous if you were aware. Could hide fairly well (not like in BF3 where the choppers had infrared vision). Generally if a team started winning too much, people would start sniping, which automatically would leveling the game back, until the winners started loosing again. It balanced itself out. I loved playing as a counter-sniper sniper :)

    But the best part that it actually tried to make the squads cooperate. 90% of all squads were bad, but with some luck (and I soon started to recognize the good leaders) I could get on a squad which really worked together. When that happened we could CRUSH the other team. Of course there were a good change that the other team had the good squads. In that case it was just a matter of playing cannon food for the round, so at least the other team could have a great time - and hope for a better next round...

    With the servers offline I bought BF3. What a waste. Felt far to arcade-like. The squads did not work. If you were on one, you were randomly assigned as "leader" - so with a squad of 5(?) there was a >80% change that the squad leader DID NOT want to lead... :-(

    Then the BF2 servers were resurrected, and I played until EA forced them closed.
    After which I swore never to buy from EA again! Good thing they are making it SOO easy! :-)

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