If it’s Battlefield 2042 news, it probably isn’t positive. As the game’s player count continues to fall and fan feedback only gets worse, it looks like EA is attempting to forget the troubled title ever happened. Yesterday, the company published its earnings for the fourth quarter of the fiscal year 2022. After flipping through the slides and the report itself, it almost seems like 2042 never happened. In fact, the Battlefield series is scarcely present at all.
In a call with investors, Battlefield 2042 was brought up, and EA had no choice but to discuss the seemingly doomed title. When asked if EA’s commitment to investing in 2042 had changed players’ response to the newest update, CEO Andrew Wilson responded in the negative.
“No, and again, we take the long view here,” Wilson said. “This is one of the great franchises of our industry, built by one of the great teams in the industry, and our expectations are it’s going to continue to grow and be a really important part of our portfolio for many, many years to come.” A diplomatic answer if we’ve ever seen one.
“We’ve got incredible leadership of that team now,” Wilson said on Tuesday. “They’re rethinking the development process from the ground up, and really using kind of the Vince Zampella/Respawn model of ‘get to the fun as quickly as possible.’ They’ve been doing thousands of updates for the community, working on quality of life, and really getting the core game right. I think there’s still more work for us to do there and the team is committed to doing that work for the community,” Wilson continued.
In December, EA announced that it would create a “connected Battlefield universe” in the future, with games that share characters and storylines.
In late April, a Battlefield 2042 dataminer found evidence that the title would be adding microtransactions in the near future. The game’s delayed Season One is also rumored to be coming in the middle of June.
Battlefield 2042 was released on November 19, 2021, on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. Last month, the game fell below 1,000 concurrent players on Steam for the first time.