EA wants Battlefield to be like Call of Duty with yearly releases, new report says

EA eventually wants to morph Battlefield into an annualized franchise similar to Call of Duty, or at least that's what securities analyst Michael Pachter was told.

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The Call of Duty franchise is unique because no other series on the planet is able to make as much money per year and sell as many copies as Call of Duty. The series has made over $35 billion in lifetime earnings and has sold over 425 million copies (Modern Warfare 2019, for example, sold 41 million copies). COD is a juggernaut, but EA wants to strike back with their big Battlefield renaissance.

According to analyst Michael Pachter, EA aspires to make Battlefield more like Call of Duty and release new games every year. This transition is going to take some time, though. In the latest episode of the Pachter Factor show, the analyst says he was told by EA's Byron Beedle (second in command under Respawn's Vince Zampella) that Battlefield could become an annual series in 5-6 years.

Pachter, who has close ties with many of the most formative and influential video game creators, says that DICE and EA are currently built to support new Battlefield games every 3 years or so. That means we could get Battlefield 7 by 2028.

"I talked to EA...[to] Byron Beedle, he's running the Battlefield franchise, and their goal is three studios making Battlefield on a three-year basis so they can get to Battlefield annually. He said it's going to take five or six years before they get two in a row, so we're not going to get there for a while. So that's their plan.

"By the way, they should have done that 15 years ago. They told everyone they wanted to catch up to Call of Duty and they're finally doing it. Call of Duty figured that out, three studios making games. They've had their troubles, Sledgehammer shut down, Infinity Ward's been kind of subsumed into Treyarch, and Treyarch has two or three studios now. But it's always been three guys working on three different games for annual release."