Industrial Toys

» see industrialtoys.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Electronic Arts announced on 31 January 2023 that it was ending Apex Legends Mobile and stopping development on Battlefield Mobile. The same announcement said that Industrial Toys, the studio it had bought in 2018 to build the second of those, was closed. EA did not say how many people that was. Apex Legends Mobile's servers were given until 1 May, four in the afternoon in California; Battlefield Mobile was still in soft launch and simply stopped.

The studio had been formed in Pasadena in 2012 on an argument about the platform. Alex Seropian started from a position he shared with Tim Harris and Brent Pease: there were not enough good games on phones for people who actually played games, and the ones aimed at that audience had been carried over from somewhere else instead of designed for the device. His framing to GameSpot was that you treat the phone as its own platform and start again, because the way people pick a phone up and put it down is nothing like the way they sit down in front of a console.

Seropian's history is the reason the studio got written about. He co-founded Bungie in 1991 and stayed through the Marathon and Myth years into Halo. He left after Microsoft bought it and built Wideload Games in Chicago, then spent a stretch running game development at Disney Interactive. Industrial Toys was the third company. Joystiq's write-up in 2012 quoted Harris promising art talent out of Marvel and DC, and said the plan was hardcore games for mobile.

Midnight Star shipped in early 2015, a first-person shooter built for touch, with a sequel called Midnight Star: Renegade in August 2016. Then EA acquired the company in July 2018 and the studio's own intellectual property stopped being the point.

~ the dossier ~

~ midnight star ~

Seropian's public case for the studio was about scope rather than ambition. He told GameSpot that the teams doing well on mobile brought plenty of production value without much scope, which was the right trade for the device, and that designing long levels requiring thirty minutes of attention at a stretch did not work on a phone. Midnight Star was the game built against that reading.

The commercial result was not what the funding had been raised against. The studio shipped its first game in 2015 and its second in 2016, a modest output for a company that had announced it would invest millions in the space and assemble a dream team, and the second one landed in a market that by 2016 was being won by free-to-play operations with user-acquisition budgets rather than by production value.

EA was buying that expertise in 2018. The asset was a team that understood how to make a core shooter feel right on glass, attached to a franchise with an audience already in place.

~ what battlefield 2042 cost ~

Battlefield Mobile went into testing in selected markets in the fall of 2021. Battlefield 2042 arrived that October to a reception bad enough to reorganize the whole franchise around repairing it, and in an interview with Mobilegamer.biz in May 2023 Seropian put the cancellation down to exactly that: the mobile game was collateral damage from the main-line launch. Apple's changes to advertising identifiers have been cited as a second pressure on the economics. EA's public line was that it wanted to refocus on the Battlefield series itself.

EA has closed a lot of studios and this one is unusual mainly in how little of its own work survives it. Midnight Star and its sequel were delisted. industrialtoys.com stopped resolving. midnightstar.com still has a host behind it, and that host answers 404. The pitch here was premium core gaming on a phone, sold to someone who would pay once for a real game, and the phone games that actually spread where I live were free ones carrying in-app purchases. I never bought a paid game on a handset either. Eleven years of work produced two games under the studio's own name, and the one EA finally bought it to make never left soft launch.

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