Battlefield 5 being inclusive is not about women or feminism, it’s about selling more microtransactions

Surprise, surprise: EA fooled everyone, gamer and critic alike.

When EA announced that Battlefield 5 was going to include characters of both sexes in May of 2018, some gamers were enraged that the game strayed away from historical accuracy. They stated in their tweets, on the forums or subreddits that they would not be buying the game if the game was going to have women and black men (in addition to unrealistic cosmetics, like katanas or cricket bats) fighting on the frontlines. To this backlash, EA’s -now former- chief creative director Patrick Söderlund responded with “accept it, or don’t buy the game”, stating that he wanted his little girl to be able to play as a female. Turns out, saying that was not actually a good idea, as Battlefield 5 preorders simply plummeted to new lows for the franchise.

The question to be asked here is this: Is a corporation like EA actually so symphatetic to women’s plight that they let Söderlund say “accept it or don’t buy our product” about a million dollar budget game they are going to publish, to the point that they are willing to sacrifice sales for the game? Or is there something else, some other financial motivation behind this? I think it is the latter.

We all know that AAA publishers are pushing for microtransactions in AAA games in a big way for a while now, and there is a push-back from the traditional gamers who believe that by buying a 60 dollar product, they are entitled to all content and extras there are. So what is the solution for this problem? It is bringing the biggest spenders of the mobile market into the AAA scene: women. And the best way of achieving this is the inclusion of women characters in big releases like Battlefield 5, so they will feel more welcome and be much more inclined to spend money. Plus, they thought that they were going to hit two birds with one stone with this move: They were also going to get good scores across the board on Metacritic from the ‘open minded critics’, so it was a win-win siutation no matter the perspective you were looking at it from.

So, there you have it: EA’s plan was always getting more potential customers for microtransactions, and it wasn’t about inclusion or feminism. Of course, there could be a few designers, or creative directors/officers at DICE and/or EA who genuinely wanted to make way for inclusion in video games (albeit a forced one; instead of doing it on a WW2 game, they should create a new IP to do so), but, in my opinion, they were only used by EA, and when their plan failed and the fan backlash was greater than expected, they were promptly thrown to the wolves (it says he left the company on his own but the fact that cannot be a coincidence considering the much lower than expected BF5 preorders).

I simply don’t think faceless corporations like EA are that sentimental, especially to the point that they would sacrifice preorders just to support inclusion in video games. What they actually do is salivate over the in-app purchase money the mobile games are getting, and try to get some of that themselves. And they perfectly fooled you all, made you think that it was about women, feminism, and inclusion; but it was just about getting a new type of customer interested in AAA releases and raising their finances a bit more, as is their motivation for most of the things they do.