Video game company Electronic Arts (EA) caved Friday to angry demands from Star Wars fans who objected to the prevalence of micro-transactions in its new Battlefront II game.
EA made headlines Monday when it set the record for least-popular Reddit comment of all time at more than 700,000 downvotes. The comment was an explanation of why Battlefront II allowed players to buy their way to better weapons and hero characters while forcing those who wouldn’t or couldn’t pay to spend hundreds of hours unlocking the same things with in-game currency. EA partially capitulated early on, cutting the in-game cost of hero characters by 75 percent. But EA completely caved on Friday, removing all real-money purchases from the game.
“We’ve heard the concerns about potentially giving players unfair advantages,” EA wrote. “And we’ve heard that this is overshadowing an otherwise great game. This was never our intention. Sorry we didn’t get this right. We hear you loud and clear, so we’re turning off all in-game purchases. This means that the option to purchase crystals in the game is now offline, and all progression will be earned through gameplay.”
Most popular video games like League of Legends, Halo, and Counter-Strike either limit in-game purchases to cosmetics that don’t effect gameplay or allow players to unlock items with similar ease through gameplay. Game developers go to great lengths to avoid their games being labeled “pay-to-win,” an accusation which was almost universally leveled against Battlefront II.
“The suits that control your company aren’t interested in anything but pushing out shitty incremental upgrades to keep us wasting money on shit, and on getting a small percentage of addicts to bankrupt themselves $5 at a time….Every new game that I’ve bought for the past year, I’ve checked to make sure that EA was not involved before paying,” one Redditer wrote. “I plan to continue that until serious changes are made.”
EA earned $4.6 billion in 2016, making it the sixth most profitable company in the game industry, with Tencent, Sony, Activision Blizzard, Microsoft, and Apple outperforming it, reported AListDaily.
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