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[IbizaPocholo]

What’s wrong with AAA games? The development of the next Battlefield has answers.

EA insiders describe stress and setbacks in a project that’s too big to fail.

arstechnica.com

Today, publisher EA is in full production on the next Battlefield title—but sources close to the project say it has faced culture clashes, ballooning budgets, and major disruptions that have left many team members fearful that parts of the game will not be finished to players' satisfaction in time for launch during EA's fiscal year.

They also say the company has made major structural and cultural changes to how Battlefield games are created to ensure it can release titles of unprecedented scope and scale. This is all to compete with incumbents like the Call of Duty games and Fortnite, even though no prior Battlefield has achieved anywhere close to that level of popular and commercial success.

I spoke with current and former EA employees who work or have recently worked directly on the game—they span multiple studios, disciplines, and seniority levels and all agreed to talk about the project on the condition of anonymity. Asked to address the reporting in this article, EA declined to comment.

According to these first-hand accounts, the changes have led to extraordinary stress and long hours. Every employee I spoke to across several studios either took exhaustion leave themselves or directly knew staffers who did. Two people who had worked on other AAA projects within EA or elsewhere in the industry said this project had more people burning out and needing to take leave than they'd ever seen before.

Each of the sources I spoke with shared sincere hopes that the game will still be a hit with players, pointing to its strong conceptual start and the talent, passion, and pedigree of its development team. Whatever the end result, the inside story of the game's development illuminates why the medium and the industry are in the state they're in today.

Check the link for more.

Culture Clash & Studio Tensions

• The project involves multiple studios worldwide, leading to a "culture clash" between teams—especially tensions between European development teams and EA's U.S. profit-driven, quarterly mindset.
• Insiders suggest top-down mandates and business pressures are overshadowing creative autonomy .

Crunch & Development Hell

• The project has experienced extensive crunch, with long working hours, stress, and crunch practices becoming widespread across the team
• Milestone delays impacted Alpha, with the game missing major features (notably the single-player component), leading to two-year campaign delays

Massive Budget, Massive Pressure

• With an estimated budget reaching $400–500 million, expectations are enormous. EA reportedly needs tens of millions of players and high microtransaction revenue to justify the cost

Alpha Signs vs. Warnings

• Despite internal setbacks, the closed alpha reportedly performed well in playtests and impressed some testers
• But sources warn that Alpha passed with many tasks incomplete or underestimated, raising risk of future compromises

---

Summary

The upcoming Battlefield is a high-stakes AAA gamble—the most expensive in the franchise to date. While early gameplay (alpha) looks promising, development has been marred by inter-studio friction, long hours, and delays. With EA depending heavily on monetization and massive player engagement to recoup costs, the project risks becoming another crunch-fueled battlefield—on and off the screen.

 

[ADiTAR]

Western creative has been awful across media. Games, movies, music, tech.

A vision is something only one person has, and since you can't say no to people or "you're wrong" anymore, you end up with a mess.

 

[Small John McCarthy]

Western creative has been awful across media. Games, movies, music, tech.

A vision is something only one person has, and since you can't say no to people or "you're wrong" anymore, you end up with a mess.

Yeah it's weird. It's almost like the West stopped hiring talent based on how good they are at the role in question.

 

[SILKYSMOOTH30FPS]

This is EA, tho. They've been like that since forever. And i don't know what i want from the next BF. It's been ages since a good BF came out, it'd be nice to play something on par with bf3, bf4, bc2, but at the same time, i kinda want them to face plant as hard as 2042, just so EA loses a fuckton of money and see all the shareholders mald. EA truly does deserve to be deleted from the industry.

 

[A.Romero]

The test played pretty good. I have a good feeling about it.

 

[Loomy]

• With an estimated budget reaching $400–500 million, expectations are enormous. EA reportedly needs tens of millions of players and high microtransaction revenue to justify the cost

To be fair, they're essentially making 2 games.

It's a shame the development is this fucked up, because this is the most excited I've been for a Battlefield game since Battlefield 3 coming off the awesomeness of Bad Company 2.

 

[ADiTAR]

Yeah it's weird. It's almost like the West stopped hiring talent based on how good they are at the role in question.

even if there is talent, you will get piles of shit on them until they just go "meh". Who want to fight all the time at work.

 

[Felessan]

Projects are too big for current organizational structure and thus they lose manageability
There should be some change in structure, probably big team split in smaller ones and which one has clear deliverables
East has rougher corporate culture so they deal with increased numbers of people working better.

 

[Hypereides]

Culture Clash & Studio Tensions

• The project involves multiple studios worldwide, leading to a "culture clash" between teams—especially tensions between European development teams and EA's U.S. profit-driven, quarterly mindset.
• Insiders suggest top-down mandates and business pressures are overshadowing creative autonomy .

Smh, Wilson. You're so desperate for this franchise to become CoD that you're going out of your way to shed anything that remotely made it stand out. You're not going to reach that wild "100 million players" expectation you crave. Your, and your team's, mandates have already soured any chances from that happening.

 

[Windom Earle]

EA. Battlefield does not need single player. Return to your fucking roots.
Edit: You know what it also doesn't need? Different time periods and woke shit.

 

[Luipadre]

Just drop the fucking useless single player for battlefield and focus on its strenght, the multiplayer. Who the fuck cares about a mediocre 4 hour long SP military campaign. Im playing BF for the multiplayer.

 

[nnytk]

What’s wrong with AAA games? The development of the next Battlefield has answers.

EA insiders describe stress and setbacks in a project that’s too big to fail.

arstechnica.com

Check the link for more.

Well, imo it seems as if DICE is now working with an Early Access type approach. Instead of "fixing the game after launch" they're actively "fixing the game before launch".

Who would've figured that this is the way to go...

 

[Sakura]

How can you maintain a creative focus when devteams are so large/corporate these days?

 

[JimmyRustler]

Yeah it's weird. It's almost like the West stopped hiring talent based on how good they are at the role in question.

Basically. It's all the result of the open door policy that swept though the industry a decade or more ago. You know, let everyone in. Diversity is good. All nice and dandy, but the problem is that those people that are let in are not as open when it comes to hiring new talent after them. So as the old, experienced staff leaves basically no good new staff is recruited but exclusively the sorts of people that are let in because of diversity sake.

Do that a couple of years and you erode the talent completely and are left with a lot of incompetent people.

 

[Crownttano]

I just want a Remake of Battlefield 3

The next Battlefield has been looking like absolute garbage, alpha play test and all

This is gonna be 12 years straight of me playing Battlefield 4
the PS4 version of a PS3 game on PS5

And with how poorly Battlefield 6 is developing, seems I'll continue to be playing BF4

 

[mrMUR_96]

EA. Battlefield does not need single player. Return to your fucking roots.
Edit: You know what it also doesn't need? Different time periods and woke shit.

Battlefield's "roots" were ww2, vietnam, current era and the future. Battlefield has always done different time periods, it just needs to be done well.

 

[SunnySideGuy]

Ehh I for one enjoy the BF campaigns. BF3 had an awesome single player story and people still talk about certain missions from it to this day. If done right they're a good time and for someone like me increase the value of the overall game. I could care less if it's 6 hours or 10 as long as they're a good time.

 

[mrMUR_96]

Ehh I for one enjoy the BF campaigns. BF3 had an awesome single player story and people still talk about certain missions from it to this day. If done right they're a good time and for someone like me increase the value of the overall game. I could care less if it's 6 hours or 10 as long as their a good time.

The bad company campaigns were genuinely a lot of fun.

 

[Killjoy-NL]

I just want a Remake of Battlefield 3

The next Battlefield has been looking like absolute garbage, alpha play test and all

This is gonna be 12 years straight of me playing Battlefield 4
the PS4 version of a PS3 game on PS5

And with how poorly Battlefield 6 is developing, seems I'll continue to be playing BF4

Whut?

The new BF is going to be BF4 on steroids.
It's exactly how a successor to BF4 in 2025 should be.

 

[March Climber]

Yeah it's weird. It's almost like the West stopped hiring talent based on how good they are at the role in question.

This is the cope answer.

 

[Flabagast]

Let's hope it crashes and burns

 

[winjer]

I really doubt this is going to be a good Battlefield.
The talent has already left the studio a long time ago.
If that budget of 400-500 million is true, there is now way this game will make it's money back.
It has been so long since there has been a good BF, that most people no longer care about it.

 

[March Climber]

I really doubt this is going to be a good Battlefield.
The talent has already left the studio a long time ago.
If that budget of 400-500 million is true, there is now way this game will make it's money back.
It has been so long since there has been a good BF, that most people no longer care about it.

Unlike Concord, where people keep trying to convince myself and others that a game with some characters, a handful of maps, and some flavor text would cost up to 400m…

I can totally see an AAA project like Battlefield with campaign, multiplayer, and whatever other trend-chasing modes put in, actually costing 400m to 500m in budget.

 

[Small John McCarthy]

This is the cope answer.

Fair enough. What's the real answer? lATe sTaGe CaPiTaLiSM?

 

[March Climber]

Fair enough. What's the real answer? lATe sTaGe CaPiTaLiSM?

That's also a cope answer, and it wouldn't explain the indie scene.

The truth no one wants to hear is that there is no simple fix-it answer for a multi-tiered complicated issue like this.

People keep trying to solve the issues of the gaming industry like some simple math problem, place a blame on a single sector anyway, and then become shocked when their wanted 'talent-based team' gets fired anyway after a pat on the back from the publisher.

Then the next cope becomes 'Well clearly the team wasn't talented which is why they were let go' as the person who says that doesn't bother looking up the talent behind it, or my new favorite 'No one cancels good games' as if there isn't a full website dedicated to good projects that caught the bad end of a deal.

If this next Battlefield, which has already rumored to have too much money pumped into it, fails...then most of GAF will blame the developers, the developers will blame the hate communities, investors will blame the publisher, the publisher will blame a third party, and the board will blame leadership. All happening at the same time while Battlefield sinks back into the black hole it just came out of, solidifying EA as a Sports company with a small asterisk for the random licensed, AA, or indie game that they publish.

 

[Bernardougf]

The same thing as the current Hollywood movies industry ... you have incompetent studio CEOs hiring incompetent directors/teams and writters, than they spend hundreds of millions on dogshit to have this dogshit obviously test bad in screenings than the same dumb CEOs intervene to change writters, sideline the stupid directors and do a lot of hundred million costing reshoots... than after many millions expended in this frankstein project you release to the public to an obvious underperfomance and loss of money. Rinse and repeat.

The same thing is happening to western (us more specific) gaming. The culture changed. Its not that hard to understand or see.

 

[Fbh]

Games got too big and expensive. While some publishers, like Activision, seem to have figured out a workflow that works for them, most others just seem completely unable to manage these super large projects with tons of devs, multiple studios and massive budgets.
The desperation to compete with COD instead of being happy having a smaller but still profitable niche probably doesn't help either.

• EA reportedly needs tens of millions of players and high microtransaction revenue to justify the cost

Sigh, great. Can't wait to see Spongebob shooting at the kids from Stranger Things, Ariana Grande and Skibidi Toilet in the next Battlefield game

 

[Small John McCarthy]

That's also a cope answer, and it wouldn't explain the indie scene.

The truth no one wants to hear is that there is no simple fix-it answer for a multi-tiered complicated issue like this.

People keep trying to solve the issues of the gaming industry like some simple math problem, place a blame on a single sector anyway, and then become shocked when their wanted 'talent-based team' gets fired anyway after a pat on the back from the publisher.

Then the next cope becomes 'Well clearly the team wasn't talented which is why they were let go' as the person who says that doesn't bother looking up the talent behind it, or my new favorite 'No one cancels good games' as if there isn't a full website dedicated to good projects that caught the bad end of a deal.

If this next Battlefield, which has already rumored to have too much money pumped into it, fails...then most of GAF will blame the developers, the developers will blame the hate communities, investors will blame the publisher, the publisher will blame a third party, and the board will blame leadership. All happening at the same time while Battlefield sinks back into the black hole it just came out of, solidifying EA as a Sports company with a small asterisk for the random licensed, AA, or indie game that they publish.

I might be too old to understand what cope means. I think you're right that this a multi faceted issue that cannot be explained with a single sentence.

The intention behind my original comment wasn't to explain the decline with a single issue - but it certainly is a factor and one that I am sensitive too because I am quite opposed to intrinsic characteristics overtaking drive and talent in hiring decisions.

I don't have a horse in the race really. I hardly play video games in comparison to most people posting here. But I do like to observe the industry and I'm more than happy to be wrong - I hope developers in the East and West succeed. But, if not, I'm not at all invested emotionally.