canadianvice :
I hope this game fails. Publishers and the people involved need to learn that getting all political is not what we're here for.
Sorry you don't like some of the criticism your game is facing, but you don't get to insult your whole customer base over it and still sell well.
This really isn't true. Games have always been political, it's just that the stances they took were largely taken for granted by their playerbases. Wolfenstein 3D came out in 1992 with the non-controversial (at the time) stance that Nazis = bad. The closest it came to a backlash was a ban in Germany. Not for it's anti-Nazi stance, but because it included Nazi symbols and imagery and Nazis = bad. It was banned for not being anti-Nazi enough.
Fast forward to 2017. Wolfenstein II: TNC is set to be released. The theme Nazis = bad, exactly the same. Reception? There are articles everywhere from The Verge to GQ to Forbes to the Washington Post to white nationalist outlets about the brave/controversial/popular/reprehensible decision to include the Nazis = bad theme. In 1992 it wasn't controversial because people took Nazis = bad for granted, and it didn't even register as being a political message. Now?
https://www.gq.com/story/wolfenstein-the-new-colossus
"It's been... really weird," says Wolfenstein: The New Colossus narrative designer Tommy Bjork. "It's both strange and unsettling, I think. Wolfenstein has always been a game series that has always had a really strong anti-Nazi message, and we're really proud of continuing that tradition with The New Order and The New Colossus. It's one of the main themes—being an anti-Nazi game. In 2017 that that's controversial is just really weird."
This isn't something that sprang up out of nowhere purely in the last 25 years. In 1992, there were significantly more actual Nazis living than in 2017. So why wasn't Wolfenstein 3D facing the same sort of criticism back then? Why wasn't their entire playerbase feeling insulted by the over politicization of a video game? Largely because people didn't even realize it was a political message. Most took Nazis = bad for granted and assumed everyone else did too. Only it turns out that they didn't, but were probably too afraid to speak up with an unpopular view back then.
If you take a theme in a game for granted you may not even notice it's there. Nazis = bad. America = good. It doesn't always work that way. Gameplay advantage lootcrates = bad is a sentiment shared by every gamer right? So you would expect every game that has them to fail, and not a single lootcrate would ever manage to get sold...And yet the most popular games in the world are micro transaction based mobile games. It's dangerous to assume that your views are shared by an entire customer base, it lulls you into thinking you're able to speak on their behalf.
You can go back as far as you want to find games with a political message. ET (widely regarded as one of the worst games of all time) on the Atari had you playing as a persecuted alien being chased by an "evil" government scientist and FBI agent. Despite the numerous, numerous bad reviews, that was never mentioned as being the games downfall. Everyone focused on the (horrid) gameplay. And yet now, there's a passionate debate over the appropriate role of science and the FBI in government affairs. If ET were released today, you can be certain those themes would be explored by people harboring an agenda.
And I don't know how a series like Battlefield has ever been anything but political. The entire basis for the games has been modelling actual wars that took place between actual countries with differing ideologies. Picking a side in a war is about as political as it's possible to get. They've already had one game set in Vietnam, and if people are only now noticing it's been political...I don't know what to say except that it must be something hitting even closer to home than that.