EA Believes C&C: Rivals Perfomed Below Expectations
In EA‘s official quarterly earnings call for Q3 of the current fiscal year that was released two days ago, the company touched on the performance of Command & Conquer: Rivals.
With our latest release, Command & Conquer: Rivals, we had positive soft launch results. But since global release, it is not driven in stores organically at the levels we anticipated. We are now working to bring more players into that game. We continue to be committed to mobile. We believe in the value of our franchise in the marketplace, and we are doubling down on these games through live services. We are also putting our best teams on bigger projects and exploring additional ways to create and iterate quickly. We have always focused on profitability in mobile, and we are evolving to better position ourselves for growth in the future.
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And on mobile, we moved one of our titles out of the year. C&C: Rivals is also ramping slowly, and we made changes to Madden Mobile that reduced monetization. On top of this, unprecedented competition for players’ time impacted the growth of our titles.
EA seems to lament every single release as “below expectations” and try to hunt for a scapegoat for that outside the company (e.g. the same earnings call blamed the “poor” performance of Battlefield V on the “competition” of Fortnite and Red Dead Redemption II) instead of their own shortcomings. It would appear that the level of attention given to Rivals from its own separate fanbase, which surprised in size even myself as someone who immediately prepared a casket for it as soon as I heard about it, is not enough for the once overconfident publisher whose stocks have taken an insane dive in the past several months, and which fell even further on the day the earnings call was released alongside the stocks of many other publishers.
On a personal note, I’d just like to share my disbelief at the lack of self-reflection executives and select developers within major companies have, taking absolutely no responsibility of their own and blaming everyone and everything else for their own failures. If EA manages to survive the year without major blows, we are looking at an upcoming C&C remaster release which brings hope that at least someone (you know who you are) recognizes that their own customers matter more than shareholders in the long run, but time will tell sooner rather than later whether that will be properly put in deeds and not just words.