Battlefield 5 misses its goal as EA discloses sales figures

Electronic Arts announced some juicy details about the financial success of their newest online shooter Battlefield 5 during a conference call with investors. Despite astronomically high sales numbers well in excess over 7 million, BF5 still somehow ended up being a “failure” by not achieving the expectations by the large game publisher.

A fascinating look at the business side of gaming, as pretty much 99% of all games with similar sales would be lauded as mega-hits. So, how can such a thing happen? 7.3m is a large number, even for big AAA games. But when you are EA, one, if not the largest game publisher in the business, expectations tend to be astronomical. Indeed, if we didn’t directly hear from EA themselves that Battlefield 5 missed the target, the 7.3m figure would rather end up as a positive surprise in favor of the game which has been slammed pretty much since its announcement.

After seemingly a constant rain of negative PR surrounding BF5, the common conception among gamers was that the game would end up disappointing massively in resonating with its fanbase. A lack of content at launch, releasing in a very crowded period right next to long-awaited juggernauts and not least a PR nightmare between a very vocal group of fans painted anything but a rosy picture for the World War II shooter.

And yet, BF5 missed the publisher’s goals by a mere million. Not really that of a failure after all. In a transcript of the conference call provided by video game analyst Daniel Ahmad, EA points at the reasons for the slight failure by prioritizing the single-player campaign over the much-hyped battle royale mode Firestorm and an unfortunate release window as the main culprits.

However, EA is also pointing out that Battlefield 5 is meant to be a healthy live service which only grows and becomes better over time. As such, the arrival of Firestorm this March is expected to boost player counts significantly.