Call of Duty: Mobile has been a rip-roaring success for Activision by every metric, especially in terms of the revenue it generates, and recent companies have seen a number of major publishers trying to gain a foothold in the mobile gaming space for a piece of that pie as well. EA tried to follow in its competitor’s footsteps with Battlefield Mobile, but the game ended up getting cancelled and shutdown earlier this year.
While there were likely to have been several reasons for that, according to Alex Seropian – founder of Battlefield Mobile developer Industry Toys – the failure of its console and PC counterpart Battlefield 2042 was a major factor.
Speaking in a recent interview with Mobilegamer.biz, Seropian said that the widespread backlash against Battlefield 2042 “cascaded a bunch of introspection” and contributed to the mobile title’s shuttering, while he also added that Apple’s changes to rules for IDFA, an anonymized unique identifier for advertisers, also “made user acquisition a lot more expensive”. Alongside Battlefield Mobile, Apex Legends Mobile, too, was cancelled earlier this year.
“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,” Seropian said. “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.
“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 cancelled it, whether it was economics or whatever, but without me saying, you could fill in the blanks, I guess.”
Though Battlefield has taken a few pretty major beatings over the last couple of years, it seems like EA has ambitious plans to expand and improve the franchise. A new Battlefield game is in development, which, in addition DICE working on the multiplayer, will also see Ridgeline Games developing a narrative campaign, and could launch in 2024. Meanwhile, Ripple Effect Studios is also working on a separate Battlefield experience.
