It seems that the co-developers of Battlefield Mobile, a Smartphone Battlefield experience that never got out of the trial markets in Asia and never saw the light in our market, got a few things to say about why it was never meant.
Industrial Toys co-founder Alex Seropian (who also co-founded Bungie in 1991), spoke to Mobilegamer.biz about Battlefield Mobile and why it was never a finished product when Electronic Arts pulled the plug late last year.
And it was pretty much the hardship that the release and Year 1 of Battlefield 2042 the main culprit.
“At the beginning all the wind in the universe was in the sails of the SS Battlefield Mobile: the [shooter] 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.”
Also, Apple Inc and the failure of Apex Legends Mobile has some share of the fault too.
“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.
And then Apex came out and I don’t know if EA has talked about why they canceled it, whether it was economics or whatever, but without me saying, you could fill in the blanks, I guess.”
With all that, For Seropian’s perspective, the soft-launch on Asia market of Battlefield 2042 was doing well, but for EA it was important the aspect of Battlefield Mobile to be a complementary to the main game release, while Industrial Toys tried that Battlefield Mobile was an entire experience independent of the main game.
Almost three months ago, Electronic Arts announced the cancellation of Battlefield Mobile after a soft-launch in Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore and was slated as a free-to-play Android/iOs alternative to play within the Battlefield universe.