After Electronic Arts and DICE have changed Star Wars Battlefront 2‘s progression and microtransaction system, it seems that there is a split among gamers in that some feel consumers beat EA, while others feel that very little or next to nothing really came out of the situation. In this piece, we’ll examine both sides.
In the beginning, EA and DICE released Star Wars Battlefront 2 in November of 2017, which would move on to garner bad reception from media outlets, websites and various forum boards due to its progression and microtransaction setup. Fast forward to March 16th, 2018, and a report on ea.com would detail the March 21st update patch, which attempted to fix the controversial title.
After the March 21st update went live, a slight split among gamers emerged in that some felt that a victory was established through this move by EA and DICE, while others felt that nothing had been done at all.
We have The Act Man who expresses his stance on the situation at hand, who also has a video and description as posted below:
“The Star Wars: Battlefront 2 scandal shook the world of gaming. Probably the biggest controversy since the original Mortal Kombat, it was a PR disaster for Electronic Arts. But has EA and DICE fixed Battlefront 2 with their latest updates? Did gamers TRULY win this battle? Or is it just a fleeting victory?”
This prompted a response-like video from LegacyKillaHD, who isn’t bashing on The Act Man, but simply stating his opinion on the situation. Contrary to The Act Man’s video titled “Gamers Vs. Electronic Arts – We Won,” LegacyKillaHD’s video header text reads ” Electronic Arts vs. Gamers – We Lost.”
Below, you can watch LegacyKillaHD’s take on EA and the situation at hand.
There’s something interesting that I would like to throw in courtesy of both videos and that is a summary of what has taken place with EA, Star Wars Battlefront 2, and the bill that Hawaiian State Rep. Chris Lee was trying to get into motion.
Firstly, let’s take a look at EA stock over the course of a year, and I’ll let you be the judge of what it looks like from the past (before and after Star Wars Battlefront 2 shipped) to now.
Secondly, although Star Wars Battlefront 2 did not meet EA’s expectation in regard to sales, it still was a profit to the company. We know this because publication site gamesindustry.biz reported Electronic Arts CFO, Blake Jorgensen, saying:
“For Q3, we had expected to sell about 8 million units, but we fell short of that by less than 1 million units.”
Opposite of selling under EA’s expectation comes monetary gain through Star Wars Battlefront 2’s microtransaction system, which had no impact on the company according to this section filing published on November 17th, 2017:
On November 16, 2017, Electronic Arts Inc. (“EA”) announced in a blog on its website at www.ea.com/news that it will turn off all in-game purchases for the Star Wars Battlefront II title until further notice. This change is not expected to have a material impact on EA’s fiscal year 2018 financial guidance.
The third and last thing is about State Rep. Chris Lee and his team’s fight against loot-boxes. In a new report on the hawaiitribune-herald.com, as seen in LegacyKillaHD’s video, Lee and crew have pretty much failed. The site reports on Lee’s bills by saying:
“A quartet of bills that would have regulated potentially addictive “gambling” systems in video games died after failing to meet legislative deadlines.”
So what does all of this mean then? Well, it means that EA and DICE took three steps in the microtransaction arena but only got knocked back by one step. The antics did manage to get the ESRB involved, who passed a label that will mix non-predatory games (spanning across DLC and MTX) with games that are predatory, and the end result still managed to leave DICE’s Star Wars Battlefront 2 with active microtransactions.
