Can you tell what kind of message is being sent to Electronic Arts with the YouTube voting on the gameplay trailer for the newly-announced Command & Conquer Rivals mobile game? 244 upvotes. 7,900 downvotes.
The strategy game’s “reveal” trailer isn’t doing much better. A thousand up. Nineteen thousand down.
It’s about as easy to point and laugh at that kind of statistical debacle as it to smash the downvote button on a newly-announced game that most of us haven’t played yet. Both are understandable, though it’s a wonder how game companies keep allowing this to happen.
Surely EA had to know the displeasure it was going to receive bringing back a beloved decades-old franchise not in any type of PC real-time-strategy game glory but as a competitive phone game.
Maybe they did and are just gritting their corporate teeth through it, trusting that any wave of negativity online won’t impact this game’s ability to find an audience on mobile. Market research may show they will have the last profitable laugh.
Then again, in the interest of being player-friendly, it sure would be nice if companies like EA would find a way to level with fans about the status of the franchise they’re awkwardly reviving. Go back to 2016 to another trailer-mass-downvote situation, when Nintendo brought back the Metroid series after a long hiatus with a four-player co-op game starring anonymous space cops.
Is it not feasible to say: “We are also working on/considering other Metroid/Command-and-Conquer games?” Maybe try that next time?
Over on Twitter, there’s an official feed for the new C&C that’s trying to find some sunshine in this storm. It’s sporting a meager 288 followers and has tweeted six time.
Whoever is running it retweeted legendary esports figure Sean Plott yesterday. Plott wrote: “As much as I had the knee jerk ‘wtf mobile RTS no way’ reaction, I’ve had the chance to play C&C Rivals and its actually pretty tight. I’m very curious to see what it will be like once it hits full release.”
Game companies worry about how leaks might spoil the impact of a game announcement. But what about something like this? EA didn’t exactly set themselves up for a positive response.
Perhaps there’s no way around it, though. Such is the nature of E3, when game-makers and gamers are operating in a mode of anticipation and the facts of the present don’t matter much. Publishers and developers try to convince players that the games of the future will be terrific, and players react by providing their user reviews far in advance.
Comments
15 responses to “New Command & Conquer Mobile Game Is Getting Mauled Online”
as it fucking should be
I don’t think EA really give 2 shits. They print money, they’re not gonna care about likes on youtube. They were voted the worst company in the world two years running and that didn’t stop them from microtransactions and canning Star Wars games that people actually wanted to see
Yeah, that’s the problem. People as a collective are so fucking stupid that you can openly treat them as farm animals that give money instead of milk and they’ll still rush to open their wallets for you as long as you have a halfway decent marketing wing.
Watching the E3 announcement was instructive – two well-known competitive players, mobiles in hand, tapping a screen without much in the way of enthusiasm while the audience mostly yawned their way through the presentation. And then the reveal: this was Command & Conquer. And barely a whimper in the crowd.
EA obviously thought that gameplay before the name reveal would have been the best way to go, with the memory of Westwood’s demise still painful to most of us, but I’m not sure they were right. I think they should have started with the game’s trailer – it’s quite well done – and then landed in to the gameplay. Most people in the audience were visibly confused and then dismayed in turn. With a franchise with this much weight behind it, EA dropped the ball.
I have still pre-registered to see the game in pre-alpha, because I’d rather judge the game by its gameplay, but this feels like a PR nightmare gathering force.
Zero surprise here, this is essentially a middle finger to the fans. It would have been better if we got nothing at all.
A lot of this down votes will be the same people who will download it and buy some premium currency as well
well yea, first they fked up Tiberium 4 and now they go one step further with a mobile game.
no matter how tight and awesome the game might be you’re bound to annoy someone (or everyone)
Nintendo had the right of it with the recent Pokemon reveal saying ‘whoa there, settle down; sure Let’s Go isn’t a traditional version of the game, but that new main series title is coming next year’.
I’m not against mobile versions of beloved franchises (nor am I for, honestly couldn’t give 2 shits about mobile games) but I really don’t think that E3 is the right place for quite that much time to be devoted to a game they likely knew would be ill received.
On that stage, at that time, people aren’t after a 15 minute session with shout-casting for a mobile game. More than that, the people most likely to play it aren’t likely the sort to be watching E3 for the announcement of the hot new mobile game.
It was a swing and a miss, and while the game looks fine, it wasn’t what the audience wanted to hear.
A spare thought on mobile gaming, if you’re going to announce a mobile version of a well loved IP, you do it like Bethesda did with ES:Blades. That looks genuinely fascinating and is the sort of innovation or forwarding of the mobile market that warrants a place on the E3 stage.
-B
Nice analysis and overall thoughtful comment 🙂
A downvote means nothing at all, only to the sad people who jump on an obvious downvote train. It SHOULD mean something but these days nah, it just some gamers have nothing better to do that think this is the greatest type of political statement that can make.
So hang on the whole downvote thing is because they decide to just do a mobile game instead of a PC game?!
that just makes it even more hilarious sad.
That’s your takeaway from this? Mate seriously.
EA took one of the flagship RTS series, took Westwood themselves, broke up Westwood and trashed the Command and Conquer name with the average CC3 then dropped the ball again with Red Alert 3, which was just… not good. Then came the abominably bad CC4. They then did away with the potentially good Generals 2, which by all first impressions looked like a return to form but got axed. We also had a ‘Command and Conquer’ reboot in the works which itself seemed promising but never appeared. EA just didn’t see a point, despite there being a fanbase. We also had an incredibly promising FPS pop up, then disappear as EA axed work on it. All these projects that were started, then stopped by EA.
They’ve teased and teased and teased over the years PC AND console players (I played CC on pc, then Red Alert on PS1 for example where I loved it, then RA2 on pc), but instead of looking towards a series that should be rebooted into something interesting, a series which could be updated into multiple different styles, possibly a Battlefield style game? Possibly the worlds most impressive RTS? Hell, what about an online RTS with a persistent world people could battle over? That’s worked before, it could work now.
But instead of being daring, we get a cashgrab mobile game where EA can sink the hell out of microtransactions. Because they will definitely be attached, there’s no way they won’t be. EA has hung onto a great property for so damn long, infact it’s 20 years in August 2018 since they bought them, 20 years since they snagged the property.
That’s what makes it even more hilariously sad.
They’ve had this property and in all this time, they’ve just done nothing but run it into the ground. So those downvotes do mean something and you can bet your ass the companies *do* pay attention to some degree, despite you thinking they don’t.
Yeah I know all that but you tell me all the downvotes for this are people thinking all that? Not the far more likely downvoting train like we see on all manner of things these days. It is so common that these days, it doesn’t send any message other than ‘oh yikes, upset gamers ahead’ roll eyes.
I am just as annoyed we never got another C&C game but quite frankly it’s their franchise now (sadly) they can do what they like with it (even more sadly), I just don’t see how a downvoting snowball is actually supposed to upset them. If nothing else it’s gave them heaps of free advertising… EG I only saw this and know the game is a thing is because of the downvoting.
Yeah but who actually likes C&C except for fans of the RTS who absolutely hate this kind of game? It’s an old IP dressed up as a mobile game targeted at… Nobody. Of course people are going to be pissed off and downvote it.
EA are free to do whatever they like with their games, that is true, but people are free to express their displeasure at how shitty their attempt to squeeze money out of a once great franchise is.
I’m not so sure… these negative public reactions will lead to a mass of downvotes on the appstore when the game comes out, which in turn will immediately turn off potential neutral gamers that otherwise might have enjoyed the series.
It’s the Ghostbusters effect in a gaming context… with that movie the studio thought they were playing it safe by using an established brand, but their approach – rightly or wrongly – so alienated the core fan base that the film was a massive flop. It obviously didn’t help the film was tone deaf and just not very good, but with a constant stream of negativity up against it, many casual film goers just decided not to bother.
I think the same fate will await this ultimately. The entire conception of this title is slot machine cynicism at its worst, and with the sort of legacy C&C has EA should have known they’d be up against it with this approach.
The question is just to what extent the inevitable one star average rating this game will earn on the app store effect the uptake of the average non C&C gamer. I can only speak personally, but I generally avoid titles that have very poor user scores.
And when it fails (because it is not going to be another one of those mobile hits) we will get a delightful “We had a solid title that just did not resonate with the audience” (read: we are blaming the players) excuse spoken with so much corporate speak that even the Kane himself will give up…
I feel like they should have just done a mobile remake of C&C: Sole Survivor – does anyone else remember that gem?
Lets you cash in on the battle royale craze going on at the moment (and, I mean… Westwood did it 20 years ago guys), revive an older title, AND not screw with the fans of the more popular entries in the series.