Game journalists are already running damage control and adding a lot of “caveats” to the sales data for Battlefield V, which is well on its way to joining the Get Woke, Get Broke Master List. All the corporate cajoling and shilling from the media can’t stop the broke train from claiming a victim in Battlefield V, though, especially if the first week of sales are anything to go by.

According to Eurogamer Battlefield V launched in fourth place behind Red Dead Redemption 2, Call of Duty Black Ops 4 and FIFA 19 in the U.K. The Gfk sales chart for the week ending on November 24th was not a pretty one for Battlefield V, despite being a new launch title.

Last Week This Week Title 5 1 FIFA 19 7 2 Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 2 3 Red Dead Redemption 2 New Entry 4 Battlefield V 11 5 Forza Horizon 4 13 6 Spider-Man 3 7 Fallout 76 4 8 Pokémon Let’s Go Pikachu 1 9 Spyro Reignited Trilogy 9 10 Mario Kart 8: Deluxe

As noted in the article, the game was down by 50% of Battlefield 1’s physical sales. This is comparing five days worth of tracked sales from Battlefield V versus just three days of tracked sales from Battlefield 1.

Eurogamer tries to pine hopefully for some sort of balance from the digital distribution front, writing…

“Battlefield 5 was available digitally earlier if you bought the pricier Deluxe Edition, which granted access on 15th November. And you could gain access earlier still if you subscribed to Origin Access Premier, which only launched this year. And then there’s the general rise in digital game sales over physical copies. As ever, UK numbers company Chart-Track only counts boxed copies sold.”

Eurogamer still had to admit that even in their own review of the game it was berated for its ridiculous launch glitches and having half its content missing from the release. The rest of the propaganda-filled War Stories doesn’t arrive until December, and the Battle Royale mode doesn’t launch until March of 2019, next year.

Eurogamer wasn’t the only one trying to reason out Battlefield V’s piss-poor launch week sales. GamesIndustry.biz – yes, the same one that defended China’s Communistic censorship practices – also attempted to add some silver-linings to the numbers for EA and DICE’s first-person agitprop shooter, after admitting that the U.K’s physical sales for the quarter were down this past Black Friday with a 4.6% drop in revenue and a 6.7% drop in unit sales, writing…

“There’s a few caveats to consider, of course. The first is that digital sales are not included – we do not know if download sales over Black Friday were up or down. In addition, Black Friday ran for a far longer period this year, having started (in some cases) up to two weeks before. […] “[…]All of this means that the one big new release of the week, Battlefield V, had to settle for No.4. It’s not a great start for EA’s shooter, with launch sales down more than 63 per cent compared with 2016’s Battlefield 1. Even with the expected rise in digital sales, it seems like the shooter is another AAA title to struggle in the current marketplace. However, it did perform better in its first week than titles such as Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Fallout 76.”

Fallout 76 was another game that flopped hard out of the gate and continues to flop around more than the boney remnants of Angelina Jolie’s mostly absent skin-bags with nipples barely attached

Historically, AAA games that get off to horrible sales starts usually don’t recover. Sometimes they’re able to retain a playerbase if they can fix things up nice and neat, but they almost never go on to become a sales force, with the rare exception of Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six: Siege. But beyond that anomaly, most other games that falter off the starting line just sink lower from there. And given that Battlefield V has been revealed to be nothing more than social engineering from DICE and EA, and that the company told gamers that they were “uneducated” for not buying into the agitprop, it’s unlikely that sales will ever kickstart for the game.

(Thanks for the news tip Valok)