作者彙整: Matt Bertz

Announced two days ago at the keynote address, the Google Stadia streaming platform is the talk of the 2019 Game Developer’s Conference. Both optimists and pessimists have hot takes on the viability of a service that ditches the need to buy a physical piece of hardware and instead jacks gamers directly into a cloud server. To learn more about how Google plans to address potential roadblocks like latency, data cap overage rates, and building a strong first-party library of video games, we spoke with VP Phil Harrison.

Let’s talk about the name and the logo. What made you decide Stadia was the right name? And what was the meaning behind that name choice?

I think it’s a perfect name. It was the culmination of a huge amount of creative work by various teams. Naming things is unbelievably hard, because you come up with a name. Then somebody else has it. Or you come up with the name, and it means something weird and a different country. There’s a lot of impediments to landing on a great name.

But “Stadia” is the plural of stadium. The way that it resonated with me was this idea of a stadium – and you saw this in our film that we debuted yesterday – this idea of entertainment being either about sports, but it’s also a stadium as a place where you could go and see a rock band. It doesn’t have to be about seeing a football team or basketball team.

Also, you can either be on the pitch as a player or you can be in the audience as a viewer. So, this idea of watching and playing, being merged into one platform, which is the product truth of what Stadia is about. And this notion of a stadium meaning, you and I could be sat on the couch playing a game and have the greatest combative rivalry or shared exhilaration moment. For that moment in time, this couch is the best stadium in the world. I thought that was great, this idea that we could take that name and really run with it.

Then the logo, the meaning of the movement of the logo. Obviously, there’s an S in there, but then there’s this, almost graffiti mark. But then there’s also the idea of a banner. If you look at it carefully, you can see it’s like a flag being waived. So, there was a lot of double meaning in there. And I thought it came together really well.

You have an interesting background for a project like this because you worked in the platform wars, in the old console days, you’ve been on both sides of that. You were an investor and advisor to Gaikai. You understand the fierce sense of loyalty certain consumers have towards brands, and over the years as these programs have gotten more intense with PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, their friends are all on these places, their back catalogs are on these places. What do you see as the best way to chink away at that armor and get people over into something that’s new?

I think it’s very simple. We have to deliver great games, great experiences, in a great way, and completely respect that the social graphs are sticky, but we’re not asking anybody to buy any hardware. We’re not requiring people to buy any hardware. Of course, we’re asking them to [points to the Stadia controller] so, I think those allegiances that you talk of are historically around a very significant capital investment that gamers had to make.

The frequency of those capital investments is going up. They’re having to be made more often. Stadia’s core value proposition is to eliminate the box. Eliminate the barrier to entry. Allow you to get the same highest quality game experience irrespective of the kind of screen that you’re on. I hope that that was clear in our presentation, that that’s not a future promise, that’s a today.

If we can bring games that are familiar in a very good way on Stadia and bring games that are new that really deliver on the promise of, your platform is a data center, then gamers, we hope over time, will see that this is what a true new generation platform looks like.

This isn’t the first time we’ve had a major GDC announcement centered on streaming. Ten years ago, OnLive had a press conference revealing its streaming technology, and Steve Perlman talked about the chief challenge to streaming – solving the problem of the speed of light to get latency down. What do you think has changed in the years since those early attempts at streaming?

I think I was in the audience at that presentation. What has changed? First of all, this is real. Stadia would not exist if we weren’t able to stand on the shoulders of giants with what Google’s been doing for the last 20 years. Google’s fundamental investments in the fabric of the data center, the networking that connects the data centers together on our own private backbone using our own fiber optic cables. The breadth and penetration of our infrastructure to the furthest edge of the network, not just in the massive data centers that people think of when they think of a data center. The seven and a half thousand locations around the world that shorten the touch point between gamer and game.

Although the speed of light is the one thing we don’t control, we can cheat the physics of it to a certain degree by getting as close to the gamer as possible. That’s why having a studio of the pedigree of id Software on stage saying, “We were skeptical, we tried it, we developed for it, and we’re now convinced,” I think is the best message that you could hear. It doesn’t have to come from us. It comes from a very respected creator.

You touted some impressive modern benchmarks in terms of performance with 4K, HDR, 60 frames per second, but that obviously to some degree is dependent upon bandwidth and the speeds of the internet service provider that people have. If you’re going to be invested in Stadia, what baseline ISP speed should you be looking at?

We proved with Project Stream that we could get 1080p, 60 fps for around 20 Mbps. We will get 4K, 60 fps for around 30 Mbps. Obviously, if you don’t have a 4K TV, you can stream at 1080p, and you will use less bandwidth. We think that gives us access to hundreds of millions of potential audience.

What has been the technological leap that’s allowed you to do that other than the footprint of the network? Have compression techniques changed dramatically in recent years?

Very much so. It’s partly the algorithms for compression, Google has been a leading contributor and collaborator on some of the advanced open source video codex that are being propagated around the industry, and also some fundamental investments that we make at the hardware level to make it possible.

Obviously, the United States is a unique challenge because broadband providers have so much land to cover in this country as opposed to countries like the United Kingdom or Japan. There are usually dead zones where devices don’t work as well as in city centers. What do you see as solutions for people that maybe live in more rural areas where they’re not getting that larger pipeline?

The way that we think about it is, if you have a really good YouTube experience today, you will have a great Stadia experience. We acknowledge and respect that that doesn’t reach every corner of the world, but there’s a rising tide and hopefully, internet infrastructure would continue to grow out further and further into more rural areas, and then there’s some really useful enabling technologies, potentially around 5G that could even accelerate that further.

It’s unfortunate that we won’t capture everybody day one, but our commitment is to get as close to everyone as we can.

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Let’s talk about 5G, because the theoretical speeds that they tout are certainly eye-popping, but there are so many X-factors of where that speed is going to be in practice as opposed to theory. Whether it’s how many nodes there are, the quality of a person’s router, how much of the infrastructure an ISP like Verizon or somebody else has built out. How much faith do you have in that to really be a game changer?

On paper, it does look like it’s going to be a significant factor, but until we’ve had a chance to really test infrastructure that is outside of laboratory conditions, it’s impossible for me to comment.

How much are you worried about data caps and throttling? We ran into a problem when the Xbox One X launched where editors redownloading a bunch of games in 4K were suddenly getting notices from Comcast that they were already over their allotted data cap for the month. Is that something that gamers are going to have to be aware of if they sign up to a game streaming service?

I think ISPs have been really proactive and somewhat responsive as well to the reality of the market. When music went to streaming, bandwidth caps lifted. When video TV went to streaming, caps lifted, and I think we’ll continue to see that evolution. Plus, as we just talked about, with 5G potentially adding some competitive value into the marketplace, I think this will get better over time for everyone.

Are you hopeful that net neutrality gets restored? Congress is entertaining a new bill right now.

I’m not going to get drawn into that conversation.

During the presentation, we were introduced to a handful of developers working on Stadia projects, but you showed a bunch of icons of games like, “There’s an arrow to the knee. That’s clearly Skyrim. That looks like a Red Dead emblem.” Why didn’t you show more of the lineup?

Our code name for the event was PBA, which was Platform, Vision, Announce. We wanted to announce our vision for the platform. We wanted to communicate some new and in some cases quite complex features about how games and game watching are going to interrelate in the future. And we chose to amplify or illustrate those features with certain games. So, we had NBA 2K showing how you can come in from a YouTube streamer, creators subscriber list, into playing alongside them. But don’t read too much into which games we chose or which games we didn’t show. In the summer, we will be focused very much on the games. The lineup you’ll be able to play at launch, and shortly thereafter.

When you say summer, are you planning to be a participant at E3?

We’ll be back in the summer.

Every time a new platform appears, the predominant thing that seems to sway people toward it the thing you alluded to in your first statement – content. What is the edict for the first-party studio that Jade Raymond is leading? Is their job to maximize the full potential of this technology with quadruple-A experiences, or are you looking for more of a shotgun blast approach where you want a lot of new content that comes really at a faster clip more like how a Netflix pushes content?

Initially, it is to bring the best of Google to game development. So, that a game cannot tick every box, of all the features that we talked about yesterday, but thoughtfully and selectively act as a beacon and as a lighthouse for those technologies. So that a gamer can see, “Oh, that what’s meant by the data center is the platform.” And that means that game developers will be inspired by what we do. As Jade correctly shared yesterday, we in turn will share that technology back out to the game development community. Everyone then lifts faster. That’s the reason for doing it. We don’t have to cover every genre. We don’t have to be the premium or predominant supplier of games on our platform. But if we can have those amazing experiences, that really lifts everyone, the Gran Turismo of driving that is the preeminent high-quality experience that everyone goes “Okay, that’s better than I could have done elsewhere.” Those are the kind of things we want to do.

Jade obviously came on very recently. Are these early days for that studio?

She was on stage on her seventh day.

Pretty busy first week.

Yeah.

Has that division been running without an appointed leader for a while, or is this the very beginning for that group?

We’ve had producers and related talent working inside of Stadia, inside my organization, for quite a long time. We’re working initially with external developers on a commercial arrangement. And now we’re building our own studios, where we will be putting our own talent into a Google Stadia Games and Entertainment. Which is so exciting to be able to just get that off the ground now.

During one of the montages during the presentation, you showed some esports events. The biggest games on the planet right now are competitive games like Fortnite, League of Legends, and Apex Legends. Do you feel like your latency is at a place where competitive gamers are going to look at this as a viable platform to play on?

Absolutely. I think the pinnacle of esports is guys in logo t-shirts sitting in custom chairs on a stage, and I’m well aware that they often buy the kind of mouse which will give them a tiny edge and they will have an active mousepad because that gives them a tiny edge. Those are an amazing aspirational place to be. But for now, I think we have the 99.9999% of everybody else that we can focus on.

Everyone is curious about Stadia pricing. Are we going to be buying individual games? Is it going to be a subscription service? Is it going to offer both? 

I’m not going to go into the details on that today. We’ll definitely be sharing that in the summer, but we’ve spent a lot of time partnering with our publishers and developers to come up with the right model for them. And we’ve done a huge amount of research with gamers as well.

What sort of incentives are you using to lure third parties to be a part of this opening debut of Stadia?

We’ve been able to share our vision with developers for quite some time. All the folks you’d expect. Some that you wouldn’t expect have been disclosed on what we’re doing with Stadia. I’m pretty thrilled with what we’ve got coming. Tell me what you think when we share it in the summer, but I think the commitment, the lineup, and the long-term promises is phenomenal.

You’ve been a part of product launches before where it seems like there’s usually a ballpark of 30 games or so that come out in that launch window. Are you doing things differently this time?

I don’t know that there is a scorecard of you have to have this many games to launch, but it’s having the quality, the breadth, the brands and games that are maybe familiar from a previous generation now being re-imagined for a new generation. Having the right balance between those, I think, is going to be the trick.

Are you aiming to have game experiences for every demographic at launch, whether it be games targeted towards kids, game geared toward competitive markets, or single-player experiences? What kind of mix are you looking for?

Let’s talk about that in the summer. You will see that we are more focused toward the higher end, enthusiast, core gamer. We’re not going to be covering all bases day one. I think it’s fair to say our lineup is going to be focused on slightly older or more committed gamers. But it’s important that we land there well. Then we can scale from that point.

When did you start designing the Stadia controller?

That predates me. It’s been underway for at least two years. It’s entirely in-house built and designed. I think the team has done an amazing job with the ergonomics. Inside there’s some very clever technology, as I’ve talked about, that connects via Wi-Fi to the data center. But the ergonomics of it are fantastic.

Are you talking to the high-end, third-party manufacturers like Scuf, who deliver those extra features people want out of their, say, first-person shooter controllers? 

Over time, I think we will see some third-party controllers. Our platform supports HID USB controllers from day one.

Coming from a person who has like 42 different devices because I’m a technophile and knowing there are multiple devices that the controller can pair with, how does it know which screen you’re intending to play on?

It’s very clever. There’s some technology that will know which screen you want to play on. You can obviously expressly say which screen you want to play on, but there’s also some technology that just enables that to happen seamlessly. There are maybe scenarios where you might have a primary game screen that you want to use all the time, but you then want to move quickly to a laptop or to another screen elsewhere in the house. Our platform supports that.

You’re supporting all kinds of controllers, but some of the devices you support are touchscreen devices. Will there be touchscreen interface with some Stadia games?

Eventually, yes.

But the opening salvo, you’re focusing on more controller experience?

Correct.

One of the things you mentioned was being able to migrate save files from other platforms. How are you doing that? Is there a handshake that needs to happen where, say, Uplay needs to allow me to migrate my Division 2 save?

I wanted to be clear from the get-go that, what were the principles that we were going to be approaching multi-layer. As a 21st century platform, frankly as a Google platform, being open is really important to how we approach this. It wasn’t a dig at any of the incumbent first-parties but it was more a “let’s be clear about what our philosophy, which is we want to be open, we want you to bring your progress from another game state into Stadia.” Then the example you just gave, for example, your Uplay account is the point of arbitration between the other platforms is exactly how it would work in practice.

But saying you’re open to it is different from saying you’ve spoken to the Steams, Uplays, and the Xboxes of the world. Do those conversations still need to happen?

That would happen at a publisher and developer level. Now you kind of get into the politics of it, which I really don’t think we have a voice in really. It’s down to the relationships between the developers and the platforms. Clearly, that change is happening. We’re seeing some games that have already bridged successfully, other games that haven’t. It’s a trend we just wanted to be really clear about what our point of view was, then hopefully within months this all gets resolved for the benefit of the gamer.

When you’re talking about the possibilities for the developers to harness this technology and do something new and different and foreign looking, what are those opportunities you see that seem to be the most promising?

I think most platforms historically, certainly I’ve been in this position in the past, have focused on graphics as the point of difference. This platform is better because it does X more polygons or more wizzy graphics. I think with Stadia what we have focused on is what can make gameplay better? What can make gameplay different? This idea of the data center as your platform, what does that mean for bringing ML and AI into the experience using amazing Google technologies that have historically been a bit out of reach for game developers. We can bring that to play, literally to play here. We have a microphone in our controller that you can use at your choice to have a conversational understanding with an NPC in a game. That’s a fabulous promise of what that could mean for the future of games. So those are the areas that I’m really excited about.

Then at a more macro level, this idea of how games are being designed today to be both played and watched and how we can bring that together. Even sitting down with really smart and forward-thinking designers and developers, they’re already starting to think about, “okay I’ve got a game producer and I’ve got a broadcast producer” and they start to think about bringing those two skills to bear at the fundamental design of the game. I think that’s where we’re going to see some dramatic innovation.

When you launch later this year, what kind of infrastructure do you have in place? I know you mentioned parental controls are already a part of the equation. What about friends lists? What kind of solutions do you have in place for that stuff?

We’ll go into the details in the summer, but just at high level, rest assured, yes, we have what you would call a platform for gamers. That will allow you to have the social features that you would expect.

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It may not have the clout of Steam, but over the last decade GOG.com has slowly and steadily built its reputation as an attractive alternative digital marketplace for PC gamers. The CD Projekt subsidiary frequently generates headlines for its impassioned stance against digital rights management – if you buy a game on GOG you own it – but perhaps its most important work ties into games preservation. 

For the past 10 years, the company has tracked down license holders for long-lost games no longer available for purchase and painstakingly resurrected them to work on modern PCs. The list of titles GOG has saved from obscurity is impressive, from floppy disc classics like the Dungeons & Dragons “Gold Box” games of the late ’80s and early ’90s to more recent cult favorites like Irrational’s beloved tactical shooter SWAT 4. Just today, the company announced a partnership with Blizzard to bring Diablo and Warcraft to the platform. But this process is rarely as easy as picking up the phone and meeting for a handshake deal. Licensing rights are inherently transitory; the further you get from the date of the original release, the more likely you’re going to run into a roadblock as companies close, creators die, and paper trails disappear. In extreme cases, GOG has hired private investigators to help track down rights owners. 

“Finding out who has the rights can be impossible,” says Marta Adamska, head of business development at GOG. Dead ends are common as they trace company liquidations and genealogical trees to figure out who may hold the key to bringing back a classic game, but through persistent scavenging GOG has managed to bring back some games that were otherwise lost to history. “I guess the biggest spectacular one was in 2015 when we signed the 13 Forgotten Realms games,” Adamska says. “It was just a nightmare because games were written and created in a way where the author of everything maintained the rights for it – the IP, the image, the music, the code, dialogue, story – everything.”

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GOG has resurrected several beloved titles like Dungeon Keeper, the Forgotten Realms series, and SWAT 4

Once Adamska’s team finds the rights holder, they aren’t always so keen to cooperate. Bitter divorcees uninterested in propping up their former partner’s legacy, relatives who have little to no interest in video games, and people too rich to bother can require a lot of persuasion to cooperate. “We’ve had a few stories where we had to travel to very random places and meet random people,” Adamska says. The quest for the rights for the Kohan series led them to the doorstep of an oil baron who acquired the rights via the acquisition of a well-liquidated company. “We go there and we’re like, ‘Hey this game is awesome and we’re sure that it can make you $50,000,’” Adamska remembers. But when a wealthy person makes that much money at the snap of their fingers, that argument can ring hollow.

The prospect of a free check interests some, but others are more moved to cooperate when Adamska demonstrates how the game in question still resonates with nostalgic fans. GOG has an active community where users keep a running wish list for games they want to see restored. Seeing the fan demand can often be the push the license holder needs to sign a deal.

The community also helps out when the GOG team runs into dead ends tracking down who controls the rights to a particular game. “Whenever we are lost we can write on a forum and say, ‘Hey guys, there’s this game and we have talked this guy and they said it’s a no. This company is a no, and this company is a no. Who else do you think might have been involved?’” Adamska says. “Suddenly, [the community will go], ‘Oh yeah, the rights went to that guy.’ We’re like, ‘It took us three years to get here and it just took them one forum post!” 

Once GOG acquires a game license, the heavy lifting transfers to their team of PC experts who modernize the game with some smart reverse engineering techniques. With the help of the DOSBox creators, GOG has created a multi-step process that helps them get the games up to speed. Sometimes, a miracle happens and the game is ready to go with the application of a few “wrappers” and some compatibility passes. But for the more complicated titles, the process can take up to six months.    

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GOG and Blizzard teamed up to update Diablo complete with Battle.net supported multiplayer

While prepping a legacy title for release, GOG testers are required to play through the entire game to look for game-breaking bugs. In worst-case scenarios, they must play through the games several times before it’s in good enough shape to ship. Sometimes, this laborious process reveals some anachronistic errors. “With one real-time strategy game the A.I. was connected to the processor cycles, so basically it turned out it was impossible to finish even the first mission because your A.I. opponent kept building units at an extremely high rate so you were destroyed in like five minutes,” says Marcin Paczyński, who heads up GOG’s product team. “The tester who was playing it didn’t tell anyone about him being destroyed by A.I. at first because he thought it was just him being bad at it.” 

Testers also occasionally find interesting Easter eggs buried deep in the program ming. “During our work on the Dungeon Keeper game, in the code we found an actual letter from one of the developers who described their last day of development before the game was supposed to be shipped,” Paczyński says. “He basically described an entire office where people were exhausted but very happy.”

For GOG, restoration isn’t complete once the code is up to snuff and the game runs well on modern PCs. They understand the heavy sense of nostalgia many players formed around the box art, manual, and trinkets that came with the original versions, so they go out of their way to retrieve and digitize these elements for inclusion. Sometimes they even recreate the anti-piracy code wheels that came with games in the early ’90s to give players a glimpse of a bygone era. Once these final touches are made, then it’s time to release the game, but that’s not the end of the job. From release day forward, GOG maintains each title to make sure it is compatible with the most recent chipsets, graphics cards, and operating systems. 

“One of the things I think that differentiates us from other platforms is we never stop caring about games,” Paczyński says. “What that means is that whenever there is a new machine, a new version of Windows, or drivers, we try to make our entire catalog work on this new system.” GOG is currently in the midst up of updating all its legacy titles for Windows 10, a job it hopes to have completed by the end of the year.

Just like any other digital marketplace, GOG’s catalog continues to expand with a curated collection of new games. But GOG’s work recovering and restoring these good old games is its defining characteristic. Future generations don’t need to travel to a video game museum to experience the formative titles of the medium’s past; they can log into their browsers and hit a download button instead. 

This article originally appeared in the December 2018 issue of Game Informer.

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When its founders were peddling pirated games on the streets of Warsaw in the early ’90s, no one knew the name CD Projekt. Fast forward three decades, and the developer is the darling of the gaming industry. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s vibrant open world, compelling characters, and short-story quality side quests earned it universal accolades. Game Informer readers recently voted it the best game of all time, and its popularity compelled Netflix to commission a series based on the franchise. Since release, the studio has built a loyal fan base thanks to a steady stream of free downloadable content, several high-quality paid expansions, and a fierce stance against nickel-and-diming microtransactions. All eyes are now on its next game, Cyberpunk 2077, to see how – not if – CD Projekt can raise the bar for open-world RPGs once again.

The world may be focused intensely on CD Projekt, but if you widen the angle slightly to take in the entirety of the Polish development scene, what you find may astound you.

Over the last 20 years, Poland has become a hotbed of game development talent, delivering memorable titles like This War of Mine, Dying Light, and Bulletstorm. To understand how this small country once trapped behind the Iron Curtain has become an epicenter for interactive entertainment, I traveled to Poland to speak with the people who put the country on the map.

Read more…

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During the lead-up to the Battlefield V launch, DICE laid out the many ambitious ways it hoped to evolve the first-person shooter series. The evolution of the fan-favorite Battlefield 1 mode Operations, dubbed Grand Operations, would add a new array of objectives to the playlists to keep the evolving battles fresh. A cooperative mode called Combined Arms would provide an evolving PvE destination. A new “Company” system would give players a greater level of flexibility for tweaking and saving class/vehicle loadouts for any battle scenario. And not one to be left on the sideline while battle royales took over the world, Battlefield V would also have its own unique take on the popular mode, dubbed Firestorm. 

When the November 15 release date arrived, only one of these promised features – Grand Operations – was included in its intended state. As crazy as that sounds, it almost didn’t ship with that mode either. Grand Operations only made its way into the Day One feature set after fans busted out the torches over news that the first major feature EA touted in its pre-release press blitz was going to come out shortly after launch and EA was forced to backpedal. 

As I said in my review, this incomplete picture made Battlefield V a tough game to evaluate on launch day. Although the gorgeous graphics impressed and DICE made many smart, smaller evolutions to the classic squad-based play, the litany of missing features made the game feel like an under-construction early access title rather than a fully featured experience on par with previous entries in the series. Fast-forward three months, and we’re still waiting for the full slate of promised features, let alone any meaningful additions that evolve the game in interesting ways. 

Playing catch-up isn’t necessarily a new thing for DICE. With seemingly each new Battlefield game, the studio infamously reintroduces problems it already solved in previous games. Bad Company 2 inexplicably split squads of friends during matchmaking. Battlefield 3 launched on PC without an in-game server browser thanks to EA’s stubborn insistence players use the browser-based Battlelog. Battlefield V also had its own easily correctable problem. When the contentious TTK-TTD fiasco dominated the fan feedback loop in the weeks following launch, DICE could have explored a fix the way most modern games do – on a test server. However, there was one small problem – Battlefield V inexplicably shipped without the Community Test Environment, which has been a series staple since Battlefield 3. Instead, the entire player base was subjected to a rollercoaster of rushed hotfixes that wildly altered the gameplay. 

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In the aftermath of that controversy, DICE is still slowly chipping away at its to-do list of previously promised features, none of which are capturing the imagination of its passionate player base. Practice Range and Combined Arms are ultimately onboarding-centric experiences meant primarily for newcomers that should have been included at launch; the fact that they weren’t reinforces the idea that this game was rushed to market to capitalize on holiday spending even though it wasn’t ready. Combined Arms was originally intended to be much more ambitious, with a dynamic mission generator and a ramping difficulty that made squads make the tough choice to extract with whatever assets they already had or see the mission through to the end at the risk of losing it all. But the version that shipped a few weeks ago is a generic and unremarkable PvE experience with none of that promise. 

The list of previously advertised features still missing three months in is surprisingly long. The battle royale mode isn’t expected until spring. The Company feature still doesn’t let you save multiple class loadouts, which means players fumble through menus to make sure they are outfitted in the best possible way for the map and mode on hand. You still can’t drag downed players behind cover to attempt a revive, and the rent-a-server and hardcore mode features from previous games are nowhere to be seen. What I wouldn’t give for a map rotation that pretends the horrible Fjell map never existed. 

Meanwhile, DICE has only released one new map, Panzerstorm, which currently only supports three game modes (Conquest, Breakthrough, and Grand Operations). Maps have traditionally been the lifeblood of Battlefield games, serving as the focal point for post-launch content. Keeping a steady infusion of new play spaces is critical to keep the fan base from peeling off to other, more compelling shooters. DICE used to have this cadence down pat. Both Battlefield 3 and 4 offered four-packs of maps via paid expansions within the first three months after launch. The days of receiving 20 maps post-launch are likely gone given the transition from paid to free post-launch content, but if Battlefield V has any chance of growing or retaining its player base, a healthy infusion of new maps is a must. 

Games like Rainbow Six Siege have proven that if a publisher commits itself to fixing a game’s problems and continually releasing new content, players will come. Battlefield V still has potential to turn the corner in the same fashion, but if the game is going to make up for its massive sales projection shortfall over the coming months and years, EA needs to send reinforcements sooner rather than later, moving past old promises and into the future. 

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