There are a huge number of things in the world that people want to divide into two types (this also applies to people themselves). And games were no exception. There are good and bad games. Those that you want to play and those that you want to quickly forget. High-quality works and pieces of code that tend to crumble right on monitor screens. Subconsciously, we believe that good games should be of high quality, and that we would want to return to them even after some time. However, in reality it turns out that this is not always the case, if not always the case. Developers can pore over their brainchild, which will suddenly die at the first stages of release. The opposite situation is also true: a semi-working game can take off in such a way that game companies frantically try to repeat the success of the unique original. But if we, most likely, will not have warm emotions towards the dark horse that was able to shoot, then high-quality games that did not quite work out will cause us a bit of resentment. The developer of exactly such games will be discussed – Respawn Entertainment.
Founded by not the last people from Infinity Ward, Respawn Entertainment predicted a very prosperous future. The former authors of the Call of Duty series are mastodons of the first-person shooter genre, and it is not surprising that their debut, as well as subsequent projects, turned out to be representatives of this genre. Not counting last year’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, two parts of Titanfall and Apex Legends came out of Respawn’s keyboards. Being solid shooters with interesting mechanics, the Titanfall series had every chance of becoming a franchise along with Battlefield, which is also a direct competitor to Call of Duty. These words sound funny today, but back in 2013, when Titanfall was first announced, hopes were higher than ever since. Why didn’t Respawn manage to blow up the industry and force its competitors to match themselves?? Even forgetting for a second about the revolution in the genre, why at a certain moment everything was so bad for the company that hopes for the release of Titanfall 3 risk remaining hopes? Let’s follow together Respawn Entertainment’s dark streak of failures.
After breaking ties with Activision, the fathers of the Call of Duty series, Jason West and Vince Zampella, joined the camp of Bobby Kotick’s “sworn friends” – Electronic Arts. Over the course of several years, Respawn Entertainment has presented to the public its new IP – Titanfall. The game was developed as an online first-person shooter, actively using the “vertical gameplay” popular at that time. The main feature of the new shooter was supposed to be the same titans that appear in the title of the game. Titanfall positioned itself as a product of a new generation, and fit well into the time when the next gene was actively replacing the current gene. The ranks of those who had doubts about the quality of Respawn Entertainment’s future release have thinned noticeably since the start of the open beta. Players who tried themselves as a titan pilot were delighted with the hair-raising dynamics and monstrous mechs. The author also had a chance to try the open beta, and I still remember my impressions of summoning a titan from the skies. In general, people were waiting for the game, people received the game. And something went wrong.
The game performed quite well at launch, and gaming journalists were generous with compliments. But EA was in no hurry to publish data on sales of the game. And if the company itself does not want to show its cards, it provokes a field of guesswork of varying degrees of anxiety. Perhaps Electronic Arts felt that the game could not sell enough copies to open champagne. And being a Microsoft exclusive, the gaming department of the small-soft games may have been wary of comparing the successes of Titanfall and Infamous Second Son, which came out at the same time. It smells like a duck, I agree, but the fact remains that Respawn Entertainment’s statement about 10 million copies sold is not confirmed by open sources about game sales. But even if you don’t look at the financial side, it’s quite obvious that players very quickly played enough of Titanfall. A small number of modes, maps, and titans played a role. It didn’t even help that these aspects were done at a high level – at that time, you could hear from everywhere about how great Titanfall turned out. It’s just that, in my opinion, people were more enthusiastic about praising the game than actually playing it.
From this point of https://spacewincasino.uk/ view, Respawn Entertainment’s first pancake can be viewed as a testing of potential. It is unlikely that a huge amount of resources will be allocated to the new IP, so the finished material will be more modest than if a sequel were created. But even a new game can be supported, which is what people who bought Titanfall at full price hoped for. Naturally, the game received patches, and along with it a season pass was announced, which included 3 content additions. More precisely, 3 sets of cards. Each is $10 individually, and $25 for the entire season pass. The public was already looking with skepticism at the deal that Electronic Arts offered them. Everything would be fine if the new maps brought variety to the gameplay, but journalists agreed that the additions to Titanfall are not nearly worth the price the publisher is asking for them. A year after the release, EA also agreed with the journalists and gave away the season pass for free. What usually prompts not the most optimistic thoughts. In a world where add-ons for Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (a 2009 game) still cost full price, such an attraction of unprecedented generosity does not appear out of nowhere. Fortunately, the Titanfall sequel was given the green light, and unfortunately, we already know how it ended.
Let’s be honest, how we remember Titanfall 2? I’m talking now about players who did not directly play the sequel, but followed the news that accompanied the new Respawn game. I do this because I am such a player myself. The announcement of Titanfall 2 did not blow the public away, like the first reveal of Fallout 4. The pre-release marketing campaign played out the standard program – we’ll add more cards, more titans, here’s a gameplay show, sign up for the beta test here, place pre-orders there. The first surprise was that Titanfall 2 will not have any season pass. Today, from the bitter experience of Star Wars Battlefront II, we know how such generosity turns out. But if we forget about money-hungry corporations for a second, this step was more than logical. Since the paid DLC for the first part did not make a big difference financially, and even attracted not the most positive attention, clinging to the outgoing Season Pass train, like some kind of Activision, would not be the wisest decision.
The second important feature of the sequel was a full-fledged story campaign, to which initially they also did not attach much importance. Of course, it’s good that it was announced, but at that time it was still taken for granted. And right before the release, few people suspected that the plot in an online shooter about big robots would be, to put it mildly, better than a typical pass-through plug for a session service game. But seriously, after the release everyone was talking about how pleasantly surprised they were by the story of the newly released Titanfall 2. The adventures of Jack Cooper and his pet titan BT sank into the souls of journalists so much that one could forget that the game was originally designed for multiplayer gameplay. They also didn’t forget to mention it, praising Respawn Entertainment for the expected innovations – more maps, more titans, and so on. It would seem like the perfect sequel. The press likes it, the people like it, Andrew get the shovels, we’ll rake in the money. That’s where the money is?
At first glance, Titanfall 2’s financial failure came out of nowhere. EA expected sales of the game to be higher, and informed the public that Titanfall 2 failed to live up to their expectations. For some reason (quite obvious) the publisher did not publish sales data for the sequel, so we are left to rely on third-party resources. For example, Morgan Stanley reports that in the first months of release, Titanfall 2 was bought about 4 million times. This figure in itself is quite small for an AAA project, but comparing it with sales of games released at the same time, 4 million seems tiny. Thus, Battlefield 1, according to the same Morgan Stanley, sold almost four times better – 15 million copies. All this leads us to a very paradoxical situation – everyone likes the game, but no one is in a hurry to buy it. Everyone knows that the story campaign turned out well, not because they themselves went through it, but because they hear it from all the news portals and social networks. If the first time the problematic launch of the game could be explained by the fact that this is a new IP, and also exclusive, then the second time such an excuse will not work. In addition, the first Titanfall felt even better at launch than its sequel, although it did not have as much content at launch as the second part. How did this happen??
18 karats of bad luck? No, the game was just unfair..
Just look at the release date of the second Titanfall to raise questions about Electronic Arts’ marketing policy. Not only was the game released in the fall – traditionally a hot month for games, but also a week after the release of another shooter from Electronic Arts (Titanfall 2 release date: October 26, 2016; Battlefield 1: October 21 of the same year). You can also argue that these games have completely different audiences: Battlefield is played by people accustomed to large maps, military equipment, and large-scale combat operations for 64 people, while Titanfall is its complete opposite: smaller maps, even fewer players on the server, and even those prefer dynamic gameplay to the measured tactics of Battlefield. Even if we assume that laying all AAA eggs in one month is quite a workable plan (no), then there are other equally important factors. After all, EA is not the only company that produces paid session online shooters in principle. And EA knows this very well, because for a good dozen years it has been facing its direct competitor – Activision. Who each year introduce a new iteration of their Call of Duty shooter, grossing an absurd amount of money despite the quality of the final product.
2016 was no exception. It cannot be said that Bobby Kotick released Call of Duty Infinite Warfare without declaring war – this has been known for a long time. And as luck would have it, a new Kolda was released a week after Titanfall 2. And sharing not only the genre, but also the similarity of game mechanics, we can confidently assume that the Titanfall audience has been the Call of Duty audience for a long time, and still remains so. And it was not a revelation that was revealed after the fact after the release of Titanfall 2. Players and journalists unanimously criticized and pointed fingers at the Call of Duty iceberg towards which the Respawn Entertainment ship is inevitably sailing. Andrew Wilson threw up his hands and divided players into three types: those who will buy Battlefield, those who will buy Titanfall, and those who can master both games, which cost $60 each. In saying this, he forgot (or would like to forget) that people who are thinking about buying Titanfall are also thinking about another purchase, only in relation to Call of Duty. And in this battle for the consumer, David came out almost naked, while Goliath was dressed in armor from a 12-year cycle of successive releases of a mega-popular shooter with a huge base of players who are simply accustomed to playing a new part of Call of Duty every year, and are not going to change their habits. The result is a little predictable – Call of Duty breaks new records, and Titanfall 2 is forgotten faster than its predecessor.
A series of these obvious failures, namely the quickly boring first part, lackluster additions, and the brilliantly stupid decision to release a sequel to a not-so-popular series between giants who were accustomed to bigger fish, could seriously undermine a well-made game. And perhaps now I would be reading an obituary in honor of the dead series, if not for the light at the end of the tunnel, which was Apex Legends. Everything that was wrong with Titanfall’s publishing policy finally served as a lesson, and EA was able to avoid another rake. The scale of the Apex Legends map allows it not to bore the player at the same speed as compact three-line maps. The game comes free and works out of the box. And in the battle royale genre, where two extremes of the awkward PUBG and too cartoonish Fortnite are fighting, Apex Legends was able to find a middle ground. If the gameplay of PUBG and Fortnite takes a very long time to get used to for people who came straight from traditional session shooters, then Apex is essentially a hybrid of the convenient gameplay of Respawn Entertainment and the then super popular battle royale mode. Therefore, we cannot talk about direct competition between these games – although they are identical in their core mechanics, they still attract different people. And the only direct competitor of Apex Legends at that time, namely the Blackout mode from Call of Duty Black Ops IIII, lost the battle royale from Respawn Entertainment in absentia – it was sold at full price, while Apex was distributed for free without any serious pitfalls.
The success of Apex Legends was so great that the effect of it echoed on another game in the series Titanfall. Over three years of inactivity, a huge number of players poured into the Titanfall 2 servers, perhaps trying for the first time a shooter that they had once heard about, but never got around to it. And with the successful release of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, we can confidently say that the series of failures for Respawn Entertainment has come to an end for some time. And that says something. In such a fast-growing industry as the gaming industry, even seasoned game industry veterans can face 18 carats of bad luck. And what’s even more offensive is that bad luck is often caused by factors that the game makers themselves cannot influence in any way. Let’s hope that future hard times for game studios will end as well as they ended for Respawn Entertainment..
