“I’m not quite ready to talk about them, but there are a lot of really interesting things happening with not just gaming but just how people are getting entertained and socialising with each other online.”
“I am formulating some plans,” he tells us. We actually built in Unreal pretty much what you would experience in a Battlefield 3, Battlefield 4 game.”Īfter Industrial Toys was closed in January 2023, Seropian launched a game development podcast and has already started to think about his next start-up. “What we were building was competitive with what Call of Duty has in-market – not a small effort,” says Seropian. This meant scaling up the team rapidly, from just 12 people when Industrial Toys was acquired by EA in 2018 to around 120 by the time the studio was closed. “So we did a pretty hard pivot, probably early 2020, and that’s when we really started thinking about Battlefield.” “Then in that timeframe Fortnite made its way to mobile, PUBG arrived on mobile, Call of Duty hadn’t come out yet, but it was about to come out…Fortnite showed that people will actually play a game with these emulated dual stick controls on mobile,” he says. Seropian tells us that when Industrial Toys was acquired by EA in 2018, the studio was at work on the next iteration of the format it had established with its two Midnight Star shooters. It had earned around $36m by the time it closed, we reported recently. Nobody wanted that, but you know, the world changes and people react.” Apex Legends Mobile’s struggles also had a knock-on effect for Battlefield, says Seropian. So all of those things sort of combine and I think that’s why you get that outcome. “Our approach was the opposite, it was a bespoke experience for mobile, because the way people use these devices and play and everything is different. “I think there’s also the trend right now for big mobile games and big IPs to take a franchise swing – to think of mobile as another platform for the franchise, there’s one big release and everything is consistent across all these platforms.” “We did our soft launch, which was going well, but it’s like okay: to get to the finish line we’re gonna need this much time and this much money to get to global,” Seropian continues.
Battlefield 2042’s troubled launch prompted “introspection” at EA around the franchise, says Seropian. Those three factors combined to make further investment in Battlefield Mobile harder to pitch to Industrial Toys’ owner EA. “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.” So organics eroded away with 2042’s release, and paid distribution got an order of magnitude more expensive because of the IDFA rules.” “Apple also changed the IDFA rules, and the long and short of it is that it’s made user acquisition a lot more expensive.
Battlefield 2042 came out and the community reaction to 2042 was not good. “In the course of the last year, a few things happened. 120 people were working on Battlefield Mobile when EA closed the studio in January 2023. “At the beginning all the wind in the universe was in the sails of the SS Battlefield Mobile: the genre is growing, it’s a great IP, we’ve got a great team – all this was super good,” he says.īut then along came Battlefield 2042, Apple’s IDFA changes and Apex Legends Mobile. There was great momentum behind Battlefield Mobile to begin with, Seropian tells us. We also couldn’t resist asking about meeting Steve Jobs and almost being acquired by Apple after his Bungie team demoed Halo at Macworld in 1999. The team had been working on Battlefield Mobile since early 2020.įollowing the launch of Seropian’s new game development podcast The Fourth Curtain, we tracked him down to ask how it all played out at EA. It left Industrial Toys founder Alex Seropian, also cofounder of Bungie and Wideload Games, out of a job, alongside around 120 others at the LA studio. EA axed Battlefield Mobile and closed its developer Industrial Toys earlier this year.
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