Early Sales Data on Battlefront II - Not Good

Posted by Bret on 12/11/17 at 03:44 PM Category: Battlefront II

According to Tweaktown, sales of copies of Call of Duty: World War II were 5x more than those of Battlefront II in November.

It is important to note that COD:WWII (11/3) was released a full 2 weeks prior to Battelfront II (11/17). But that should be good enough to account for maybe double the sales, not 5 times. It would be safe to assume that bad publicity surrounding the pay-to-win microtransactions were the main culprit of depressed sales, which may have also allowed COD to grab some scraps from would be BFII consumers that changed their minds.

EA, for their part, says that they expect a bump in sales when The Last Jedi is released later this week. It is possible that regardless of the negative publicity, the release date of BFII, which is closer to Christmas than that of COD has caused some potential buyers to hold out for better sales around the actual holiday.

There could be any number of reasons, but the fact is, COD destroyed BFII here in the early going.

EA had also mentioned a few weeks back during their announcement to remove the microtransactions, that they would return in some form down the road.

But last Tuesday, EA CFO Blake Jorgensen made the first comments from EA that the microtransactions might not make a return. According to Rolling Stone:

Clearly we are very focused on listening to the consumer and understanding what the consumer wants and that's evolving constantly. But we're working on improving the progression system. We turned the MTX off as an opportunity to work on the progression system inside the game. We're continuing to do that. I think there's an update this week and again next week. Over time we'll address how we will want to bring the MTX either into the game or not and what form we will decide to bring it into."

Seems EA hasn't decided yet what to do. While unit sales may be down due to the bad publicity pre-launch, EA might also lose out completely on their planned income from the microtransactions. They could lose in the long run, too, if Disney decides EA has mishandled the Star Wars license.