Well I try to keep this short as possible, but here’s my opinion about viewer amounts on BF V. Watching a streamer playing a BR game is always the crowd watching behind his back and hoping him to win the round, even if it would be only public gameplay winning in BR is so much more rewarding than in BF V. You could compare someone to win a BF V round to someone winning a Dust 2 TDM round in CS:GO public, because in BF there are so huge teams you rarely notice what plays from an individual streamer has led to the victory. Only things you can see are those nice sniper headshots from Stodeh that hasnt affected the result of the game in any way, that can get boring eventually. The game isnt just entertaining enough to watch someone playing, dying and respawning constantly on public.
Well as I’ve mentioned many times, easiest way to start pumping up those numbers is surprise surprise, competitive. We have had competitive Battlefield around for every Battlefield, but still the huge audiences haven’t even known about it. What would help? Promotion, EA has huge marketing department and they have never been spending resources to promote comp bf. Biggest promotion from EA’s side is to BF1 Incursions, launch event at Gamescom about Competitive BF “coming” even if it has always been there. Then there came closed alpha and updating the gamemode against feedback, 10 000x soonTM and suddenly dumping everyone by simply not answering texts or calls anymore. The promotion that happened there was these email-waves to current bf1 players that hey come to Incursions to get ¯_(ツ)_/¯ by handful of experienced competitive Battletield players in your first match because of broken matchmaker and mapdesign of Sinai(which was left only map in the pool) that made spawntrap supereasy and those players never were going to play again Incursions.
Also BF4 had ESL One series that started first 4 seasons with a mode that looks basicly like Deathmatch where little bit simpler player couldnt find logic at all, rotating and zouzouing all over the map with 10 same weapons, wonder why nobody enjoyed watching it Oo. Otherways there was everything we needed, Comp, 30k Prizepools and ESL, but the mode was badly selected. Only promotion there from DICE’s behalf was some news on battlefield.com and that’s it.
But okay, because only ranting without providing a solution is in my opinion wrong, here is my suggestion about steps to make Battlefield popular on Twitch (1st time ever I give this ultra complicated out of the box thinking solution that nobody has ever even thought about):
1: RSP
2: Develop a gamemode for comp with what you have left of your experienced competitive playerbase and actually listen to them even if it wouldnt be your own opinion because they are the ones who are going to play it.
3: Set up tournaments and leagues either with 3rd party organizers (ESL, BFN, ESB etc.) or by on your own.
Promote it like you would be promoting Battlefield 6.
Enjoy watching the spectatornumbers grow, because in every game that has comp, the most viewed broadcasts are the pro tournaments.
Ofcourse they do, they determine how popular game is for people to watch and if million people like to watch a game, maybe some % of those people are also interested to buy and play the game too.
The vast majority of people who buy a game like BFV couldn’t name an eSports team if there was a cash prize for doing so. People buy games like this to have fun with their friends, that have little to no interest in tournaments or streamers. I have no objection to EA helping to set up leagues or tournaments, and it makes sense to build-in a comp mode. Just keep in mind that most players simply don’t care about the comp scene any more than most automobile owners are interested in NASCAR or Formula 1 racing.
Yeah, but imagine that there are bikers and walkers that are interested in racing overall, and that they donw know that also cars can race with each other, so they would maybe watch a NASCAR race and become interested to follow it further, maybe even buy an own car and drive it casually sometimes.
Of course there are people who just want to play casually the game and they have bought BF V just to chill, but those people arent the target audience, target audience are people who dont own BF V yet, who are interested about competitive esports and they have been watching OWL, CS:GO Majors and PUBG Invitational and played all of those games, what would make those people to take interest to a franchise as Battlefield, competitive scene and tournaments maybe? If you want to grow a game, you cant grow it with your own playerbase, you have to go out and search for players who are interested to esports as an idea, but havent found their game to follow or are unstatisfied with the game they are playing and watching now by offering something better and more interesting.
How would anyone be unaware that there is such a thing as car racing? Most people probably have not seen auto racing live, but they’ve seen it on TV and in movies and elsewhere all their lives, they know about it. And the notion that someone would buy a car as a result of becoming aware of auto racing is not credible. Do people who find out there is such a thing as horse racing go out an buy a horse?
Anyone who already follows “eSports” is already aware of the Battlefield series even if they haven’t played the game, EA and BF are among the major players in the video game industry so they’re hard to miss. I’ve played video games about as long as they have existed, so I’m aware of World Of Warcraft even if it’s a game I don’t play, I don’t need to see it on a stream to learn about it. The same applies to Doom and Fortnite and Grand Theft Auto and Halo and so on–if you’re a video gamer you already know about all those games. Your claim that the target audience for BFV is folks who already follow online gaming but somehow are unaware of BFV seems highly unlikely.
I’m not saying that a healthy competitive scene isn’t a useful marketing tool, but it’s more likely that it will keep players in a game by giving them a league or competitive ladder to focus on and thus keep up their interest–it is far less likely that it will attract someone who isn’t already interested in first person shooter games. What does bring in new players is when their social network gets into a game, e.g. the old BF players I hang out with got into PUBG and they talked me into trying that game. The same thing has been happening in BFV, some old online gamers who hadn’t planned to buy BFV have heard how much fun the members of our group are having in BFV so they’ve changed their minds and bought the game.
Perhaps some gamers would see BFV being streamed and decide to try it, but all they need is a cheap short-term subscription, and if they don’t like the game they won’t renew so EA doesn’t profit much from them briefly trying the game. Your model might apply more to young gamers who are both more accustomed to streamed entertainment and more easily influenced by what they see on video screens, their social world is largely a digital experience so it might work more with them. Again, I’m all for EA supporting a competitive scene, so long as they don’t forget that it’s casual players who don’t follow “eSports” who make a game profitable.