A great, global community
This year’s biggest first-person shooter is a redemption story after the biggest failure in gaming history.
Sipho Kings
I’m bleeding out. The sounds of war fade as the thump of my heart gets louder. The bullet hit me high up on my chest. Probably my nemesis, a single sniper in this far wider battle of 64 players. I’ve got 20 seconds to live. Then a shout in my headset – “I’m coming!” Our medic is sprinting 160m up a mountain to get to me. Bullets hit the rocks around him. A tank shell hits the building he was in. Splinters fly. He makes it. I get back up, crouch and successfully seek my revenge.
But our team is stuck and we lose.
As the next game loads, the four of us playing in a squad are pumping with adrenaline. The chatter is happy. We swap notes and tips. Then we segue into United States President Donald Trump deploying the National Guard to California. One person in our squad is in that state with his family. That’s 12,000km away from me. Another is closer to home – 20km away – and the fourth is 10,000km away. Playing Battlefield together bridges these distances. Gaming is our way of hanging out – and it’s not just us.
Gaming is one of the world’s biggest sources of community. One in two people game on some sort of device. How much time we spend together depends on life, the weather, and how good a game is.
At the height of Covid, in 2020, that community kept us vaguely sane and alive. Call of Duty, or CoD, launched a new game a few days before South Africa’s hard lockdown began. I had a toxic job, winter was intense, and by the end of the year some of my family members would be dead. But in that game, we could escape, have fun, and make sense of the world. At its height, 75-million people were playing CoD.
Battlefield and CoD – the two big rivals of the gaming universe – have been around for over two decades. In 2002, gaming together meant lugging a computer to a friend, plugging in around a table, and eating all the food in the house. Now the cables cross continents and oceans. That means some lag.
Lag is the curse of African gamers. When you’re flying a helicopter it’s the sort of thing that means you fly into a tree or a sniper shoots you before you can shoot them. Lag really matters in Battlefield, a first-person-shooter game in which you navigate through your character’s eyes.
Big, and often bad, business
Gaming is a $450-billion industry. But top-tier games like Battlefield can cost $400-million to make. The last Battlefield, out in 2021, was the most spectacular failure in modern gaming history. It reportedly lost the developer, Electronic Arts, $100-million. It’s now being bought by a consortium headed by the Saudi state, which wants that franchise, The Sims, and the world’s biggest football game (shout-out if you instantly think of the tagline, “It’s in the game”). Microsoft recently bought the maker of Call of Duty for $74-billion to strengthen its subscription offering.
Gaming developers are struggling to find the right business model. The dominant one is an initially free game that nudges people to buy trinkets and boosts. In the last Call of Duty this got to a point where you’d be fighting against people dressed as Beavis or Butthead – sound effects included.
Battlefield 6 has not descended to that point. At least not yet. It probably will – corporates will be corporate. But for now, it is back as a source of global community.