EA boss confirms Battlefield will be 'a tremendous live service,' whatever that means
For many, the live service model bubble is bursting. Players roped into games that intend to keep on trudging forever are willing to let them keep rolling, but it seems that everyone else is desperate for devs to go back to basics.
Most want teams to release finished games without plans to complete them after launch, packaged as entire experiences rather than fun capped with an ellipsis. Now, it looks like EA is continuing the trend with the next entry in the Battlefield franchise.
Battlefield’s next game will be 'a tremendous live service'
As the era of gaming company CEOs placing all of their bets in live service games continues (with nobody forgetting about Ubisoft's Skull & Bones), EA is poised to carry on as normal.
According to a tweet from Geoff Keighley, EA boss Andrew Wilson has said that he's been playing the next Battlefield, and he’s called it a “tremendous live service."
While the context for this statement is a little muddy, it's a concern for those who've observed the wider gaming world turn to live service games as a life raft, while accusing it of failing to notice that it's sinking.
Battlefield 2042 has levelled out from the critical smiting it received at launch, but there are those who hold the game's failings to account via the live service model. Many think the model let EA feel as though it could launch a broken game and simply patch it up later.
What's most compelling here is that Wilson regards the instalment as a live service in its own right, forgetting to actually call it a "game." Is that not what it is anymore behind the scenes? Is EA so lost in the sauce that it's saying the quiet part out loud and exploding itself further as peddlers of "services" over exciting entertainment?
It's a fascinating statement that might have offered a window into the mind of a CEO who has led a charge on live service games for some time now. Also, it could tell us more about EA's business plans than Wilson had hoped to let on.
