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What’s wrong with AAA games? The development of the next Battlefield has answers.

A lofty player target was set for Glacier: 100 million players over a set period of time that included post-launch.

"Obviously, Battlefield has never achieved those numbers before," one EA employee told me. "It's important to understand that over about that same period, 2042 has only gotten 22 million," another said. Even 2016's Battlefield 1—the most successful game in the franchise by numbers—had achieved "maybe 30 million plus."

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Despite the big ambitions of the new leadership team and EA executives, "very few people" working in the studios believed the 100 million target was achievable, sources told me. Many of those who had worked on Battlefield for a long time at DICE in Stockholm were particularly skeptical.

"Development of games has changed so much in the last 10 to 15 years," said one developer. The new arrangement excites investors and shareholders, who can imagine returns from the next big unicorn release, but it can be a less creatively fulfilling way to work, as directives come from the top down, and much time is spent on dealing with inter-studio process. Further, it amplifies the effects of failures, with a higher human cost to people working on projects that don't meet expectations.

How a little-known tax change sparked a tech layoff surge

For nearly seventy years, US companies could immediately deduct the full cost of their research and development activities, from engineering salaries to software development and contractor fees. (...)

That landscape changed in 2022, when a provision from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which had been delayed, took effect. To offset the cost of lowering the corporate tax rate, lawmakers required that R&D expenses be spread out, or amortized, over five years for domestic activities and fifteen years for foreign ones, rather than being deducted all at once. (...)

The impact was immediate and severe. When companies filed their 2022 tax returns under the new rules, they found themselves unable to offset their R&D spending against taxable income fully. For cash-strapped firms and those not yet profitable, the result was a sudden and painful increase in tax bills, just as venture funding was drying up and borrowing costs were rising. The financial pressure forced companies to make tough decisions, and in many cases, the largest and most flexible expense – headcount – was the first to be reduced.