Is this the straw that breaks the camels back?

You can see what comes next from a mile away EA will reduce the grind buy cutting cost across the board 50% and give players scrape at regular intervals it'll be a band aid not fixing the P2W aspect but it'll probably be enough for most folks with a sorry and double xp or free DLC etc. Disney likely didn't want the issue overshadowing the new film coming out soon.

Worth noting Shadow of War is currently doing better than its predecessor having gone a similar loot box fiasco, were not breaking the camels back atm.

yeah- i'll echo the pessimistic sentiment expressed by a few others earlier in thread: this model isn't going anywhere. they just utterly botched the roll-out. they severely fucked the numbers, and the illusion of value was completely shattered.

someone will do this again soon and get it closer-to-right, and we won't even care or notice. and all the while battlefront 2 will probably sell just fine because star wars.

Call of Duty consistently shattered sales records for like half a decade and having the most disliked trailer in the history of YouTube only slightly slowed it down. It's the exact opposite of a game that fits the "Oh, we wouldn't possibly be able to make more if we didn't have microtransactions!" narrative. That was my point.

If shareholders seriously can't accept Call of Duty making slightly less money than before, so much so that they feel the need to patent ways to psychologically manipulate people and actively make their game experience worse if they don't pay out of the nose, they need to get their expectations in check and realize that gaming, like any other business, has ebbs and flows to it.

Or, in the words that I'd love to say to their faces, they need to stop smelling their own farts and get in touch with reality.

The backlash has been so severe that I suspect publishers will be a little bit more cautious going forward, but I don't see loot boxes going away anytime soon.

Just make the crystals easier to earn. Like a lot easier. Like 5k per game easier. Easy fix, just makes them less of a valuable purchase

I can't wait for the third installment where all is right in the microtransaction universe again.

Not gonna happen - as we all know the next stage is..."The E(A)mpire Strikes Back" ;)

And now everyone can wear everything! It's great! One of the best outfit/glamour systems in an MMO purely for that reason.

Doesn't necessarily take away from your point about Disney/Lucas being strict with their Star Wars. I just wanted to plug that outfit system they rolled out a few years ago because holy shit no class armor restrictions for glamours is fucking awesome.

I don't think this will stop SWBF2 being a very profitable game, delaying microtransactions just delays the extra profit they bring, in fact if the items in the game are so difficult to obtain by the time they add it back to the game some people might be burning to make the purchases.
A businessman isn't necessarily looking at this as a negative, he'll turn it into a test for future micro purchase plans.

Man, I'd like to think this fiasco is indicative of something. More likely, EA freaked about all the bad press impacting Black Friday sales, and some form of loot box-based progression will creep back in after the holiday buying season ends.

So listening to Dan describe the system on the Beastcast, the system is basically the same as in the Ultimate Team/Card Collecting modes in sports games. Now I get that in those games, you can go play as Tom Brady, Cristiano Ronaldo, Jose Altuve, LeBron James etc in other modes, and SWBF2 doesn't have that option, but for this to be the straw that broke the camel's back seems a bit far stretched.

Think this is more the problem with games becoming so focused on H2H Online Ranked gameplay, rather than single player or even couch co-op type of game playing. Without those options, P2W becomes more prelevant, and that is an issue. Microtransactions and DLC can be ignored if you want, but the death of single player and local gameplay at the AAA end of games is dying in front of our eyes without seemingly creating the anger this situation has to some extent rightfully caused - with regards to P2W aspect.

@jesus_phish:I read through Damion's tweet thread and there was one part in particular that stuck out to me that has always been a sticking point for me with regards to the discussion of microtransactions and loot boxes.

The particular quote is "MTX will fail if it *doesn't feel good to spend*." . There's an apparent dissonance for me between spending needing to feel good for microtransactions to be a success, and the designed reality in many games surrounding the in-game value of what is being bought and how that design distorts the value over time. My perspective for this is Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes, another EA game leveraging the Star Wars license and it's appeal. I detailed a super rough estimate of how much it would cost someone who pays money to gain something that is actually useful in the game, a figure that well exceeds anything I can understand as reasonable or sane. Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes by all appearances does exceedingly well for EA while implementing a system which can be paid into that provides decreasing value to the player the longer they play and pay for parts of the game. "feel good" is a very vague statement, so what I think Damion is getting at is that it provides a perceived value for the person paying, and yet if that's the case it should be obvious to anyone playing over a period of time how little value they get up front and how little value that purchase holds over time. However it's that intervening time that I think plays a bigger role in the success of a microtransaction system.

The rest of that same tweet pertains to a microtransaction system failing if the environment around it doesn't continue to produce excitement in the player and instead remains negative. The vocal community that surrounds Galaxy of Heroes is very hostile to anything they perceive as bad for the game, unfair, and poorly communicated, yet the game is not a failure. Players also get excited when new things are announced, even when the announcement results in another situation where details are poorly communicated. All this suggests to me that the point of failure and success for games with microtransactions exists in a much hazier space that is impacted by a lack of clarity of the value of what has been bought that creates a feedback loop overtime which obscures the full truth of the value.

Another user of these forums made a thread about their experience paying money for loot boxes in Overwatch and their perception of the value of what they'd got for what they spent after they tallied up the total they had spent to date. They were shocked by how much it was and in looking back on it how hard it was to recall what they got for what they spent the further back their history with the game went. This is an example of the obscurity and questioning of the value that I'm trying to get at. For the same reason that many casinos don't have windows or clocks, games with microtransactions don't provide a stat of the tabulation for the total amount someones has spent. Whether intended or not, it makes it easier to not comprehend the fullness of what you've paid if your never able to see it in full view. Then again considering this is a discussion surrounding loot boxes and their adjacency to gambling maybe the obscurity is intentional.

This be the straw that broke the camel's back in regard to lootboxes. The BF2 backlash has caught the attention of outside parties in a way that other controversies haven't. With the questionable legality of lootboxes/gambling, this might be thing that gets governmental agencies to seriously consider regulations.

Will publishers put lootboxes in their games if they have to deal with a bunch of bureaucratic red tape?

Mass Effect Andromeda probably still tops this. Or you could lump in all of EA.

Andromeda is just a big disappointment, it's not super messy.

No it isn't. Because as best as I can tell EA has learned absolutely nothing. reports are they think this is only a balancing issue, when it's the core ethos of the design that's objectionable.

http://www.usgamer.net/articles/ea-star-wars-battlefront-2-changes-will-balance-those-who-want-gameplay-progression-and-those-who-want-an-accelerated-experience

They are only lieing low till the heat is off and then they'll bring it back. BF2 will never be good, it probably can't be without basically making a BF3 given how integral loot boxes are to progression

The only way this will change is if gamers support games that have more ethical business models than ones that don't. I've come to believe that gamers are most influenced by hype and by marketing, so not terribly optimistic they will do this. It's what I try to do personally anyway.

@efesell: When you look at how Andromeda was made (the Kotaku article was damning), the internet exploding with face gifs, and Brad's video clip in the review. Yeah that game was a hot mess.

On topic, no the camels back is far from broken. Overwatch did it well, FIFA is still massively successful, countless F2P games rely on it. Hopefully games won't be as exploitative as SWBF2 was but games will continue to have loot boxes in some way for the next few years at least until some game comes out that has a better way to get people to pay money.

"This was never our intention"

I mean that's true, they never intended to get called out so badly for their pay to win, consumer unfriendly bullshit.

I wonder if they didn't rely so much on micro-transactions for this game if anything would have happened? Everyone might just be fed up with micro-transactions in their $60 games.

My prediction is that, despite the furore currently surrounding Battlefront 2, this launch window Band-Aid will be just that - a temporary fix to soothe a vocal minority.

Battlefront 1 sold an outrageous number of copies, and I'd wager that a good (profitable) chuck of those people will never see this PR disaster. Once the media turns its gaze, the micro-transactions will be back, and people who are still engaged with the game won't bat an eyelid.

This may be the straw that made the camel take a knee for a few months. But it will undoubtedly get back up.

Michael Transactions has been left to run rampant for far too long this year. Somebody fire up the symbolized spotlight and shine it high, we need Edge Casey on the scene to set things straight, and we need him right now.

This definitely isn't the end for microtransactions. Battlefront 2 has all the ingredients to create this perfect storm of fanatical rage. Gamers are predispose to hate EA at the best of times, the tensions regarding DLC and what constitutes good value for a $60 game have brewing at some level for years, and EA had already screwed the pooch with Star Wars just a couple weeks earlier. I can't think of many things a company could do to stoke internet fires more vigorously than publicly bumble with a franchise that has been beloved for forty years.

There's too much money in microtransactions for the industry to give up on them. I've probably spent 20-30 dollars on add-ons for Titanfall 2 and Rocket League, but those are all cosmetic and each game plays great without them. If this saga has any lasting effect it will be in dissuading developers (or the publishers that likely push for stuff like this) from tying multiplayer progression so directly to the contents of your bank account. Battlefront 2 just got the numbers completely wrong, and when you're allowing players to "cheat the system" by throwing more money at the problem, you have to thread a very small needle in order to not piss people off. Someone with more subtlety will try this again eventually.

This is not the first time a company has responded to criticisms of their microtransactions, but it is quite shocking to see EA/DICE in particular, not just changing their game in response to criticism but removing the microtransactions entirely. This could make some publishers or developers think twice about putting manipulative microtransactions in their games going ahead, but I'd want to see harder evidence before saying that this is really the point at which devs and pubs go back on gross in-game purchases. They still bring in a lot of revenue, budgets are still super high, and I've seen no data to suggest these design decisions are significantly impacting sales. I suspect there's too much money to be made in microtransactions for the industry to be really swearing off this gross design practice right now.

This thing is still going to make stupid cash for both EA and Disney. Its nearing Christmas Shopping season and a New Movie is out for Star Wars. Its the perfect storm for just backing up trucks of money to the EA and Disney offices.

They'll most likely wait until like Feb/March to turn the transactions back on. After were out of the window of the Holidays and the Movie Hype. I can see them restructuring some of how the currency works. Like giving you a daily/weekly stipend of premium currency so they can try to appease people.

I asked Klepek on Twitter if he thought that this would lead to anything, like serious changes with business practices at EA or at large and he said he was doubtful that it would. Which is kind of a shame. EA gets so much outrage that some of this will get thrown under the "mob mentality" bus, when them back peddling should be taken as a victory, it's instead taken as a thing that happened due to rumors of awful shit happening some of which were later proven to be unfounded. Including the person who pretended to be from EA who said he got death threats.

I'd like to believe this leads to wide scale changes in the implementation and structure to the act of giving us games as a service. My personal issue has never been that the Publisher/Devs want to charge post release, it's how they go about releasing that content, what size it is, what is contained within it, that is the issue. Loot boxes as the "default" are obviously a bad idea, even if there are examples of them being implemented correctly, in most cases it's due to the nature of the rest of the game. You can see a lot of Blizzard games as examples of "good" Loot Box implementation, but I mean look at the structure of the rest of the game. It fits with their loot box format. A BF/CoD style MP system doesn't really fit with random loot drops. It never really has. So putting a SW skin over it doesn't make it work, and to me that was always the big issue with the progression system in this.

Especially since SW fans are so focused on being able to do cool things and play as the characters they want to and the like. I mean you could think of several ways for them to charge for post release content that aren't as egregious or don't interrupt the flow of the game they were trying to make. I think it was just a reality that the whole system they were going for of Star Cards and grind currency just doesn't feel like it belongs in the game they built at all in any regard.

No. You think Activision is gonna pull the planned supply drops from WW2? Nah. You think Ubisoft or Blizzard are gonna take away the ability to buy in game currency to then buy blind boxes? Nah. Its one thing to have played the game and dislike it because you feel its bad or you find the multiplayer lacking is one thing. But to make an uninformed decision because of what you read on reddit isn't the way to go. The internet will move on like they do then EA will just go back to business as usual.

I think a lot of this comes from people's lack of understanding of fidciary duties (the legal duty of a fiduciary [EA] to act in the best interests of the beneficiary [Disney and investors/shareholders]). EA executives have a fiduciary duty to shareholders to maximize both profits and investor returns. It's why loot box are going no where anytime soon, if they can maximize profits, that's what they'll do... until they hit a point on a chart where they see a decline where loot boxes (or whatever) hurt their overall profits. It's why so many games are adding them... even in games where they don't make sense.

If the "camel's back" in your question is loot boxes tied to gameplay changing items or locking content behind paywalls, then yeah possibly. Loot boxes in general aren't going away though. In a sense I kinda feel bad for DICE in this scenario. You know they were probably given their marching orders by EA corporate. Developers just want to make good games while the publishers coerce them into implementing odious microtransactions to pump up revenue.

At least in your Hearthstone example the base game is free. They need to recoup money on it somehow, so charging you for a new pack of cards for 3 months of play doesn't seem bad to me.

I am wondering if the fans who rave about their 'victory' about this on Reddit will actually have achieved the change they thought they would get, or if they are just destroying any hope of a Battlefront III.

That said, while I am all for going against the majority if I think they are wrong, it seems pretty hard to make a case for EA being a good publisher. The trail of developer-corpses they leave behind just cannot be coincidental. If you dig any deeper into that issue you find that EA poses insane deadlines and demands certain annualisation of franchises to maximize profit. Maximizing profit should be a company's top priority but it should be guided by integrity. EA does not have this. If they were to get a hold of the GTA franchise, they would immediately bring it out yearly and have B-studios working on spinoffs as well. Knowing full well that the strength of those games is presented through the very fact that they have extremely long development cycles. They would throw that out, willingly create mediocre games which would have the potential to be amazing, if they see opportunity for that to make more money.

To a certain extend it isn't entirely their fault since they are a public company and they don't even get to call all the shots themselves. But it isn't an excuse either. They need far better leadership that is able to communicate to investors how they are going to make money by appealing to their audience, instead of just talking about numbers going up.

I don't see this as a problem with microtransactions in general. Destiny 2 has really good microtransactions so far. None of them do anything at all for gameplay, all being cosmetic and they give that stuff to you for free over time as well. I own everything there is to earn in that game from its digital store without spending a cent. And they are still doing an event soon that allows you to earn that stuff faster for a short amount of time if you don't have what you want yet.

This is just another EA move. And a typical one at that.

I'm wondering if this, in the future, is going to push the people complaining away from the game faster than the casuals, and making the servers under-populated. If so that would make it harder to find players online, making the game unplayable and making less money down the line. You hear about those whales that go all in on a game, but do they really end up spending more money than more people enjoying a more balanced system and staying longer?

Apparently Disney is considering stripping the Star Wars license from EA-well deserved if it truly happens.

But to what end. It might go to a worse company with developers that are less competent then the ones behind EA. Personally i would love it if they didn't just mass transfer the license to just one company. Even better if they would let smaller studios run with it. Star Wars games have been pretty terrible for a very long time, and it seems like the ones who actually could be a fun experience get canned.