guiltyspark85
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 19, 2020
My theory is many of the BF6 developers, particularly those at DICE, have been dragged kicking and screaming into making a BF game fans actually want.I'm amazed at the ego of these devs, Aside from their sports games, EA has been overseeing failure after failure for a while now and now it seems like BF6 is going to be selling like hot cakes and they still want to publicly shit all over Charlie Kirk and customers over customization options.
This Ars Technica article was published a month before the open beta: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025...ame-culture-clash-crunch-and-colossal-stakes/
I read the article when it was published and came away with the impression BF6 was going to be another dud. Rereading the article now this part sticks out to me:
There seems to be massive resentment towards Vince Zampella and Byron Beede, who have set out wanting to make BF6 as successful as possible. While there might be some legitimate concerns raised in the article about the single player, the developers speaking to Ars must have known the core multiplayer was in good shape and that's what the fans care most about, yet they felt the need to try and preemptively sabotage the marketing of the game.Speaking with people who have worked or currently work at DICE in Sweden, the tension between some at that studio and the new, US-based leadership team was obvious—and to a degree, that's expected.
DICE had "the pride of having started Battlefield and owned that IP," but now the studio was just "supporting it for American leadership," said one person who worked there. Further, "there's a lot of distrust and disbelief... when it comes to just operating toward numbers that very few people believe in apart from the leadership."
But the tensions appear to go deeper than that. Two other major factors were at play: scaling pains as the scope of the project expanded and differences in cultural values between US leadership and the workers in Europe.
"DICE being originally a Swedish studio, they are a bit more humble. They want to build the best game, and they want to achieve the greatest in terms of the game experience," one developer told me. "Of course, when you're operated by EA, you have to set financial expectations in order to be as profitable as possible."
That tension wasn't new. But before 2042 failed to meet expectations, DICE Stockholm employees say they were given more leeway to set the vision for the game, as well as greater influence on timeline and targets.
Some EU-based team members were vocally dismayed at how top-down directives from far-flung offices, along with the US company's emphasis on quarterly profits, have affected Glacier's development far more than with previous Battlefield titles.