Electronic Arts CEO feels 'very good' about the next Battlefield's launch now that Grand Theft Auto 6 is out of the way
"Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant," former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau said in 1969, describing the relationship between the US and Canada. "No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt." This is also true of some videogames, which are so massive that their impact has ripples across the entire industry—Cyberpunk 2077, for instance, muscled more than a couple games out of its way ahead of its splashdown in 2020.
Grand Theft Auto 6 is poised to be an even bigger deal, and game industry executives not employed by Take-Two Interactive have been sweating: As one anonymous executive put it earlier this year, "We don't want to be anywhere near that." The recently announced GTA 6 delay is thus very good news indeed for anyone looking to release a game prior to May 2026—people like, for instance, Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson.
The matter came up during the Q&A portion of EA's recent quarterly investors call, when Wilson was asked about the impact of "the big major expected release [that] has moved out of fiscal '26," a clear reference to GTA 6. Wilson declined to comment on how the shift might impact other companies, although he noted that the long lead-up to major game launches means "that if you weren't already ready to launch in this window, it may be hard to get ready and take advantage of what might be otherwise a less competitive window than we may have anticipated earlier."
But for the next Battlefield, it's great: The game was already slated to launch sometime in EA's 2026 fiscal year, which ends in March 2026, so there's really nothing EA needs to do except show up on time.
"What we have said all along is we've been building towards a window that we thought made the most sense for Battlefield, but we wouldn't launch into a window that we thought truncated the value that we've invested into the franchise or the value that we think our players will derive from it once they jump in and start playing," Wilson said, using CEO-speak to explain that there was no way EA was going to put Battlefield anywhere near GTA 6.
"I think now, without going too far, we believe that window is clearer than it was before, and we feel very good about launching Battlefield in FY '26."
It's not quite as unrestrained a statement as the all-caps thrill shared by Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 actor Luke Dale, but there's no mistaking the sentiment: The GTA 6 delay is a big win for EA.
EA is going hard on the next Battlefield game, with four studios working on it—Criterion, DICE, Ripple Effect (formerly DICE LA), and Motive—and a major playtesting initiative called Battlefield Labs. The official reveal isn't set to happen until this summer, and there's always the possibility that it could be delayed too, which would be very bad news for EA. There's no sign of that happening at this point, and in fact Wilson said during the same call that the response to the new game during playtesting "has far exceeded expectations," but even so I suspect there'll be some real pressure on the development team to ensure it gets done on time.
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