DICE Says Niche Appeal Makes Battlefield: Bad Company Sequel Unlikely

[Andy Chalk]

DICE Says Niche Appeal Makes Battlefield: Bad Company Sequel Unlikely

It's a sad fact of life that a semi-engaged mass-market audience is preferable to a fiercely-devoted small one.

It's a microcosm of the videogame industry: DICE would "love" to make a new Battlefield: Bad Company game, Executive Producer Patrick Bach told OXM, but Electronic Arts is iffy on the idea and thus it's not likely to happen. The problem isn't that Bad Company is a bad game, but that its oddball humor limits its appeal.

"It is a discussion about niche and mass market, I think. If you make your product more niche, you'll get more happy fans, but that audience will be smaller - some people won't care, some people will love it," Bach said. "When we did the original Bad Company and the sequel, we got a lot of criticism. Why would I play this? It's not a serious shooter, I don't care about this. I want a serious shooter with a more hard-boiled angle. And we thought it was fun! We loved it, we thought it was a great game. The narrative was amazing and the characters were amazing."

"So it's not that we've buried the crew, so to speak," he continued. "But it is true that for some reason if you want to make a game for the masses, you need to be more neutral when it comes to things like humor, because humor is very personal. Some people love it, some people hate it."

So there you have it. Entirely unsurprising - business is business, after all, and this is business - but it's still disappointing when it's spelled out so clearly. Dedicated audiences are lovely things to have but if they're not big enough to make to make a splash in the money pool, they don't really count for much.

Source: OXM [http://www.oxm.co.uk/66753/battlefield-bad-companys-humour-limited-its-appeal-says-dice/?site=oxm]


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[Vivi22]

So they'll abandon a series that actually had a decent single player and great multiplayer in favour of pumping out more main series games with terrible single player? Well done EA and DICE.

 

[JamesBr]

So they'll abandon a series that actually had a decent single player and great multiplayer in favour of pumping out more main series games with terrible single player? Well done EA and DICE.

To be fair to the devs, DICE is a subsidiary of EA. They don't have a choice.

 

[SanguiniusMagnificum]

Well fuck you too, EA and DICE. Let's make every game a big, grey neutral sludge so that EVERYONE will be *retches* "semi-engaged"....

 

[Playful Pony]

Not likely to happy indeed D=.

I'm not disapointed personally though, it was never a big fan of the Bad Company games, but I very much dislike major companies not being willing to make any game that doesn't have mass market appeal. Why can't they make a smaller, humorous adventure crafted by a smaller team and not marketed as heavily as the main franchise? If you would just learn to not spend ALL THE MONEY on every one of your projects, maybe you COULD actually do this sort of thing. I mean, the engine, art assets and expertise is in large part already there.

 

[Johkmil]

Going niche should not be a problem as long as they budget correctly relative to the smaller audience. Recycle the multiplayer off BF4 and use the money on a decent single-player campaign. The big companies all try to make the same game, forgetting that the unspent cash lies in the smaller niches. I can only play one self-righteous hardline military shooter at a time, anyway.

 

[Broken Orange]

Just give it a smaller team and smaller budget. Not every game needs to have a massive budget to be successful.

You don't have to hire Omar for the single player.

 

[josemlopes]

Battlefield Bad Company being called niche... thats funny.

Bad Company could have been called Battlefield 3 that it would have sold exactly the same and Battlefield 3 could have been called Bad Company 3 and it would also sell exactly the same, the only thing that those two "series" have differently is that the single player in one of those actually had some point of being there even though most people still didnt really cared about it.

 

[Ushiromiya Battler]

So if I get this right they'll stop making the only good battlefield series since BF2?
Well fuck....

 

[An Ceannaire]

This actually makes me angry. I'm a huge fan of the Bad Company series - give it to me any day over CoD or BF3. But that's not solely why this bothers me so much. This statement by DICE typifies a serious problem in the Triple A gaming industry; They'd rather make everybody content than make a few people happy. And that's a horrible attitude for an entertainment industry to have. Sure, you'll make a lot of money in the short run, but you end up with nobody truly enjoying your products - which can have an impact on your longevity as a series. Are we going to end up at some point in the future where there are no die-hard fans of a AAA games series because the developers tried to appeal to everybody?

And people wonder why some of us are afraid there's gonna be another Gaming industry crash in the not too distant future.

 

[Pyrian]

To be fair to the devs, DICE is a subsidiary of EA. They don't have a choice.

DICE is a wholly-owned subsidiary of EA. They are, in fact, the same company. Unless you can point me to some annual financial statements for DICE (required for publicly traded companies) or tell me the name of the top shareholders (usually disclosed for privately held companies).

I'm not sure how that clarification in any way contests JamesBr's point?

 

[Soviet Heavy]

The funny thing is... before Battlefield 3 came out and washed all life away in a blue filtery haze, the Bad Company games were being touted as the Call of Duty killers. And they did sell well. Hell, Bad Company 2 took direct potshots at Modern Warfare 2.

 

[JamesBr]

To be fair to the devs, DICE is a subsidiary of EA. They don't have a choice.

DICE is a wholly-owned subsidiary of EA. They are, in fact, the same company. Unless you can point me to some annual financial statements for DICE (required for publicly traded companies) or tell me the name of the top shareholders (usually disclosed for privately held companies).

Yes, but the decision still comes from EA and not DICE. The development team doesn't make that decision, the publisher does, even if the development team is owned entirely by the publisher. The people who actually worked on the project (DICE) are clearly interested in continuing, but the people paying the paycheck (EA) aren't. You don't blame the artist because the patron pays them to work on something else.

 

[JamesBr]

You don't blame the artist because the patron pays them to work on something else.

To each their own.

You are, of course, free to continue supporting your favorite artist regardless of what they are instructed to create.

To me, it just smacks of pointless, hopeful wishing. If an artist does not create what I enjoy, I have no reason to continue buying that artist's work.

Which is entirely fair. You shouldn't buy a product you don't want, but that doesn't mean blaming the artist for the decision of the patron to change what the artist produces. You blame the patron for switching to the production of something of don't want.

 

[Sonic Doctor]

The funny thing is... before Battlefield 3 came out and washed all life away in a blue filtery haze, the Bad Company games were being touted as the Call of Duty killers. And they did sell well. Hell, Bad Company 2 took direct potshots at Modern Warfare 2.

Seriously, the only thing that got me interested in playing the first Bad Company game was the humor. It looked to be something different than the typical military shooters, and when I did play it, I played it in one sitting and it was wonderful. Of course, the hilarious story and characters are what made the game, but that was what got me interested in the game, especially all the hilarious promotional videos they released on the 360. I got one of my friends to buy the game just by showing him the videos.

Now, I didn't get or play Bad Company 2, because all the information I looked up about it, when it was coming out, didn't exude the charm and humor the first game did. I could be wrong but that is what it looked like. If that was the case, then that is probably why they didn't continue on with it, because BC2 didn't sell as expected because most of the fans of the first didn't buy it because of what it looked to be like.

If they made a new BC game along the lines of practically non-stop silly humor like the first, then I would certainly get it, but it doesn't look like EA likes to make money by all means. They just like to do it the lazy, no substance, bloated budget way.

 

[Terminate421]

And so now we know why this competition is happening. Blame the critics.

 

[Andy Chalk]

And so now we know why this competition is happening. Blame the critics.

I think it's fairer to say, blame the bazillions of people who line up to buy CoD (and, to a lesser extent, BF) while Bad Company is largely overlooked. Mainstream, triple-A gaming is all about brands, and anything that dilutes a brand or fails to compete in its particular genre, is dead weight.

 

[Crimsonmonkeywar]

Mass appeal???? I thought the Bad Company series got amazing sales and ratings and if anything, it put Battlefield back on the map. Also, imo it had the best combination of arcade and realism, not to mention that the destructibility was pitch perfect. which seems like a feature that gets weaker and more robotic as time progresses.