Electronic Art’s much anticipated Battlefield V has been a multi-billion dollar flop. The stock has lost almost 50% of its value in the last 6-months as the company defends its strategy to feature female first-person shooter characters to fight in WWII battles.

Here is the cover of Battlefield V:

When Battlefield V released in November it was categorically rejected by gamers and fans not only for its technical failures, but because it tried to politicize the gaming community by asking its users, who are 90% men, to engage as fictional female soldier characters to fight the Nazi invasion of Western Europe.

Battlefield has historically been a success franchise for Electronic Arts. Its predecessor (Battlefield I), made billions for EA as it featured historical WWI combat skirmishes – with realistic characters – namely men, who fought gritty battles in trenches across Western Europe. There is nothing sexist about this. It is reality. Women played a part in the Great Wars but were mainly serving as medics or in support roles, which is totally fine. (Women weren’t signing up in droves or protesting their lack of involvement at the front line where you could be guaranteed to be shelled or lose life or limbs to land mines).

EA’s audience and customers are mainly boys and men, who play games like FIFA or NFL Madden. This audience craves realistic game play. When the Battlefield V trailer launched on YouTube, this audience gave over 500K down-votes to the trailer and vowed not to purchase the game. The trailer starts with the tall blonde cover character (shown above) leaping through windows and shooting down Nazi planes. Needless to say, the comments on YouTube say it all:

“The only thing that was accurate about this trailer is the medic ignoring the guy asking for help”.

“EA’s venture into revisionist history and making “gender neutral” games is an epic failure. If EA wanted to make a fantasy game featuring front line female soldiers it should have picked a fantasy genre.”

“Battlefield 6 Transgenders at War”

“I simply can’t wait to play as an autistic vegan trans female black muslim liberal SS trooper with prosthetic arms and a wheelchair. I really love how realistic and historically accurate it is.”

It’s no surprise that sales were 85% behind “Call of Duty Black Ops 4” and EA had to discount the game 50% in less than a month into release because it was not flying off the shelves. EA’s response was equally bizarre. DICE’s general manager Oskar Gabrielson responded to the criticism on Twitter, saying “Player choice and female playable characters are here to stay … Our commitment as a studio is to do everything we can to create games that are inclusive and diverse. We always set out to push boundaries and deliver unexpected experiences.”

That didn’t sit well with its largest customer base. EA fans took to Reddit to protest the game, its quality and historical inaccuracy. Not surprisingly, Reddit moderators shut down the site, stating: “We’re done, its over. New rule: No more bitching about historical accuracy, it’s a game, not a history book. Violatons will have consequences.” Apart from not describing what “Violatons” would have consequences, or what those “consequences” would be, the Reddit mods created an alternative “pink friendly” Battlefield V reddit, which eliminated criticism of any unrealistic elements of the game, and focused on touting features such as “consent only” shooting of other players in online mode:

The company then went on to say, “if you don’t like it, don’t buy it”. That was terrible PR response, because that’s exactly what its audience did. Sales plummeted and EA’s stock went from $145/share in July 2018 to now trading around $80/share, wiping out about $10 billion in market cap with it.

Shareholders of EA should be furious. Yes, billions of dollars lost over EA’s attempt to insert gender politics into gaming and rewrite history in favor of a fantastical utopian world where 50% of gamers are women and we all rejoice in gender neutral characters shooting down Nazis. Huh?

The beauty of capitalism is that it eventually weeds out unprofitable tendencies. If EA continues along its this route its eventual demise and destruction will be a reminder that socialist driven policies do not work for publicly traded companies. Its chief concern should be to make their investors and consumers happy. Those investors and consumers are judging EA and history will tell if EA survives this debacle.

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