Battlefield won’t be annualised

Battlefield won’t be annualised

Like clockwork, there’s a new Call of Duty every year. Battlefield has also become a bit of a clockwork machine, though it’s a bit slower, coming in every two years. There’s a reason for that; EA has said that annualising Battlefield would “destroy the franchise.”

Speaking at the UBS 2013 Global Technology Conference, EA’s money-man Blake Jorgensen said that annualising Battlefield isn’t something the company would consider right now.

"The challenges are you’ve got to most likely do it out of two studios because it’s hard, it’s a two-year project," he said. "Battlefield takes us about two years to develop and so you want to make sure that you’re sharing talent across studios, so you keep core talent of the product and the experience for the consumer there."

The problem with actually following through with that though is that you have two separate teams with different visions for the project. couple that with the fact that’s it’s hard to keep players excited for iterative updates every year and you have a formula that EA says could ultimately “destroy the franchise.”

Instead, EA will do what it did with Battlefield 3; support the hell out of it with post-launch content. One major annualised modern warfare shooter is enough. Two of them would be ludicrous.