The game’s project lead, Alex Seropian (who co-founded Bungie!), believes that the failure of “the big brother” led to Electronic Arts’ decision to close its studio, Industrial Toys.

Seropian co-founded Bungie in 1991 and launched his studio Industrial Toys in 2012. He told Mobilegamer.biz that due to the poor reception of Battlefield 2042, the publisher was rethinking the future of the franchise. It affected Battlefield Mobile, due late last year or early this year after being in open beta in Southeast Asia since November… until January, when Electronic Arts canceled it along with Apex Legends Mobile and Industrial Toys, which employed 120 people, was also closed.

“At the beginning, all the wind in the universe was in the sails of the SS Battlefield Mobile: the [shooter] genre is growing, it’s a great IP, we’ve got a great team – all this was super good. In the last year, a few things happened. Battlefield 2042 came out, and the community reaction to 2042 was not good. That cascaded a bunch of introspection. Apple also changed the IDFA [Identifier for Advertisers] rules, and the long and short is that it’s made user acquisition a lot more expensive. So organics eroded with 2042’s release, and paid distribution became more costly because of the IDFA rules. And then Apex Legends came out, and I don’t know if EA has talked about why they canceled it, whether it was economics or whatever, but without me saying, you could fill in the blanks, I guess.

We did our soft launch, which was going well, but it’s like, okay – to get to the finish line, we will need this much time and money to get to global. I think there’s also the trend right now for big mobile games and big IPs to take a franchise swing – to think of mobile as another platform for the franchise, there’s one big release, and everything is consistent across all these platforms. Our approach was the opposite. It was a bespoke experience for mobile because the way people use these devices and play and everything is different. So all those things combined, which is why you got that outcome. Nobody wanted that, but the world changes and people react,” says Seropian.

So Electronic Arts didn’t want to give the money to launch the game internationally, and instead put people on the streets and threw the game in the trash…

Source: VGC