Image: Electronic Arts
A recent company town hall meeting saw Electronic Arts blame the failure of Battlefield 2042 on Halo Infinite’s surprise multiplayer launch.
Electronic Arts executives are reportedly blaming Battlefield 2042’s negative reception on Halo Infinite. According to a report from XFire, the games publisher recently held a company town hall meeting to dig into the first-person shooter’s disastrous launch.
In the report, EA’s Chief Studios Officer Laura Miele claimed that Battlefield 2042 was headed towards a solid launch as, “the game was stable,” and had enjoyed positive reception from critics who had played the game prior to its release. Unfortunately, things, “took a turn,” when Halo Infinite dropped its free-to-play mode.
According to Miele, this allowed players to draw negative comparisons between the two games, as Halo Infinite was, “a very polished game,” while Battlefield 2042, “contained bugs and wasn’t as polished.” This is an unusual level of candor coming from a top-level executive, but not quite as unusual as blaming one game’s negative reception on another game entirely.
Halo Infinite was just one factor behind Battlefield 2042’s failures, however. Miele acknowledged that Battlefield 2042, “failed to meet the expectations of our players,” due to the difficulty of working with the finicky Frostbite engine and being faced with a global pandemic halfway through development. Things didn’t get much better after launch, when the game was mired in bugs and controversial additions like the Specialist system.
Battlefield 2042’s player counts have dropped significantly, dipping below 2,000 on Steam just recently. A petition to grant players a refund of the game has made the rounds with over 200,000 signatures, though EA has not responded to it just yet. The publisher has delayed the game’s first season of new content to Summer 2022 as it works on delivering bug fixes for the game.
According to the report, EA is restructuring Battlefield’s development teams to ensure a more streamlined development process. Who knows? Maybe EA can turn this thing around eventually.