The Battlefield series has been a long and successful franchise — easily one of EA’s most popular first-person shooters. During this generation of consoles we were introduced to the Battlefield: Bad Company games. The original sold rather well, but it wasn’t until the second one that the sales took off, and the online really felt like it was perfected. So, the question is, when do we get our hands on a third installment? EA’s CEO has the answer.
In a recent interview, John Riccitiello, CEO of Electronic Arts, was discussing the state of EA’s FPS franchises and how they fare against juggernaut Call of Duty. While discussing that, he mentions that he doesn’t think Treyarch, the team behind Call of Duty: Black Ops, has proven themselves to gamers just yet, and that EA can rival the powerhouse franchise with their own IPs. He then moved on to the 2011 releases and dropped some very interesting news.
“next year we’ll make a lot more progress. We’ve got a couple of third-party games in the form of Crysis 2 and Bulletstorm, and then our big focus is Battlefield 3 in the second half of the year. I’d be shocked if we didn’t take a notch out of [Activision].”
So it looks like EA is set to release Battlefield 3 at the end of next year, which should be interesting since Call of Duty releases annually that time of the year to capitalize on the holiday sales rush. This is definitely shaping up to be quite a battle, and should be interesting to see how much EA can cut into Activision’s profits.
Look for more information as we move into 2011.
[Source]
