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EA's 'Star Wars' PR Disaster Finally Pushed Gamers Into Open Revolt Against Loot Boxes (rollingstone.com)
Gaming company Electronic Arts is not having a good week. Bowing to pressure from early players of Star Wars Battlefront II and the historically negative reaction over the weekend to the company's response to complaints on Reddit, the company has now detailed significant cuts in the cost to unlock characters in its game and promised to continue to listen to player feedback. From a report: Most importantly, Electronic Arts today announced that they are reducing the number of credits needed to unlock top characters in the game by 75 percent. Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader will now cost 15,000 credits. Emperor Palatine, Chewbacca and Leia Organa will now cost 10,000 and Iden will cost 5,000. Mashable reports on the outcry that took place over the weekend: Battlefront II isn't technically out until Nov. 17, but fans that subscribe to EA Access or Origin Access -- which give Xbox One and PC players, respectively, a five-day, 10-hour window to play EA games before they launch -- are discovering how those changes feel. And it's a bad scene, friends. "At the current price of 60,000 credits it will take you 40 hours of gameplay time to earn the right to unlock one hero or villain [in Star Wars: Battlefront II]," Reddit user TheHotterPotato wrote in a post. "That means 40 hours of saving each and every credit, no buying any crates at all, so no bonus credits from getting duplicates in crates." The Reddit post produced such a mind-blowingly negative response that an agent of EA actually responded. Unfortunately, that response made things even worse. EA's Reddit account is plastered with a barrage of downvotes, with one particular response receiving over 600,000 downvotes -- a record.
Get out of the house and try talking to a woman.
This is the inevitable result of microtransactions.
Long gone are there days of just making a game and shipping it.
Fingers crossed we get our very own Crash of 1983 in the near future.
EA seems oblivious to their own conduct outwards, but inwards they know exactly what they are doing. All attention is good attention, and this has also been great business for Reddit: https://twitter.com/Colonthree...
MGTOW, women are worse than EA
I'd rather masturbate until I die.
.. for buying mmo's and steam, everyone piled on and sucked valves and gabe newells dick. These men and video game companies are thieves. The videogame market is not a market.
We're well past the point of corporations respecting the constitutional limits of IP/Copyright law they have long abandoned any kind of give and take with their public granted IP monopoly that was supposed to preserve human culture not destroy it.
""To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times "
Limited times not infinite times.
To audience is too immature and technology illiterate and post internet these companies can simply code games to take them hostage to computers inside their companies. It's fraud on a massive scale, and the worst part is the population just eats it up.
I remember the days of quake 3 and dedicated servers, the fact that quake champions is F2P is just so much bullshit and the worst part is the average gamer is too irrationally stupid to realize the consequences of their actions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I don't play free-to-play games, or games with those mechanics in them - but according to the very latest from Jim Sterling, they've hidden the refund button on EA's page for this game after the mentioned user outrage.
EA is convinced, like all the other game publishers, you are willing to shell out $70+ for the game, plus shell out even more cash for in game upgrades through the purchase of some kind of "in game currency" (credits, whatever). I don't know of any games I play these days that do not work off this model. It's enough to turn me away.
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
I actually consider EA lucky to be getting away with just consumer backlash on public forums and emails. I'm just waiting for the inevitable lawsuits of "whale" users to expose microtransactions like these for what they are - unregulated gambling. I have no respect for a company who builds a business model around exploiting addictions.
EA doesn't make their numbers. Else all PR is good PR. Look at GTA V and its micro transactions. Has made rockstar more money than they ever dreamed. Think they will change this approach in the future? Not likely.
Also I believe things will get worse for gaming and not better in the short term. Just wait till major AAA games are only subscription based only which EA has indicated on their sports franchises.
the real issue is the base game costs 60$. and then EA added loot boxes and pay DLC (microtransactions). in most game nowadays, the game is either free2play with loot boxes (or very cheap like csgo), or pay the full price and get the full game
doing both at the same time is why this is 'news'
I just ate all four blue ghosts. Kicking ass!
Such a general dismissal of the game industry as I am making a point of here can't come as a surprise to anyone that has half a brain.
Shallow games. Simplistic games. Gimmicky games. Cash grabs (games as hyped garbage).
I've even given up following Star Citizen.
EA first started milking customers with DLCs which were really portions of the game they purposefully removed, not added. Is it not enough to pay $50 for a bloody game? -Are they not profitable enough??
It's painfully obvious that they are using basic psychology techniques to frustrate gamers into buying more.
Shamelessly trying to squeeze every penny out of gamers that are ALREADY PAYING A PREMIUM is really bad for anyone involved in this project & the Star Wars gaming universe in general.
This is not to "create a sense of achievement." You do that with complexity, length and difficulty. This is a cheap money grab plain and simple.
EA just stop being a bunch of dicks. It's fucking Star Wars, IT'S ALREADY A CASH COW.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
The funny thing is they basically reduced the amount of credits to get a hero by 75%, but they also reduced the amount earned by 75% on each mission. So its basically the same thing...
Everyone's fantasy is to play the hero. But if everyone is running around in a shared game playing a hero, then suddenly heroes are normal, meaning they aren't really heroes anymore. To maintain the illusion of a heroic player character, you have to populate the world with lower-ability bots. That works in a RPG-type MMO, but not in a PVP-type MMO. SW Battlefront tried to get around it by time-limiting how long until and how often you could play the heroes. But that resulted in having to play grunts lots of times before you were allowed to play the hero (for one life after you've unlocked it). The PVP-equivalent of grinding in a RPG.
I think this is why the CRPG genre has gradually shifted away from MMOs back to single-player instanced games in recent years. It's hard to make players feel special in a shared-world game with thousands of other heroes running around. Though a good compromise might be a shared-instance CRPG which you can play together with a few friends.
Egalitarian PVP MMOs or deathmatch-type games, where everyone plays "characters" with the same abilities or picks from a subset of fixed choices with quasi-balanced abilities, don't have this problem.
It used to be that you spend your $50'ish on the game and then you got to play it. Now you get a purposely crippled version of the game unless you want to shell out more and more money each-and-every-time you play it. No thanks.
Is 40 hours really that unreasonable for this sort of game? I'm not interested in this genre of game and so I'm not aware of what the expected play time is. And the games I play don't usually have earned currency that you can spend on new characters and loot crates. That said I can, and have, put in 40 hours of gaming over the course of a long weekend. So is that kind of time investment to unlock what I presume to be one of the best characters in the game really unreasonable? It sounds like at least 600,000 people on reddit think so.
It is odd to me that gamers are acting like EA has a gun to their heads: no one is forcing you to play their game. If that's all you have in your life for entertainment, I truly feel sorry for you. Just walk away.
People are still buying games from EA?
Well, you kind of deserve whatever you get then.
Don't like debt, love being debt free.
Don't want kids, most times they'll just put you in a nursing home and fight over your belongings. (Seen this to many times already)
Don't like drama and baggage, women actually made what little drama and baggage I had 10xs worse.
Sex is overrated, just makes more of the above when you try to get a few moments of whoopie for an urge you never really asked for but were born in to.
Dogs do a better job being companions then a wife/husband. Seriously, dogs are better at everything. (Keep your mind out of the gutter please)
Most times that pretty person isn't interested in you, just your bank account/home/property.
Best you can do is find older games to play or buy games that don't do this from smaller companies.
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
- Some old book that pretty much saw this shit coming.
They just removed the refund button in Origin so nobody can submit a refund request. That's illegal in Germany and a couple other places.
They dropped the credit prices of the unlocks by 75%. But I've heard that they also reduced the credit gains from completing the story, and for matches. So.... mostly a public relations reaction from EA with much less benefit to the gamers affected by it than would seem at first blush?
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Involving gimping the multiplayer version of the game compared to the singleplayer version. Additionally, many of the multiplayer maps just didn't feel like command and conquer maps, including buildings underground, caverns, etc. Additionally the interiors in multiplayer had far less going on than the single player mode, and there was no way to re-equip your multiplayer character outside changing characters. Made a lot of the skills learned in single player irrelevant to multiplayer activity.
The game or its demo is still worth a try for fans of the command and conquer series though.
"EA's Reddit account is plastered with a barrage of downvotes, with one particular response receiving over 600,000 downvotes -- a record."
Okay, i have very mixed feelings about EA and in general i'm fine with people expressing displeasure over them trying to pull off crappy behavior like this. But it's kind of sad that the most unpopular thing on Reddit is because a bunch of people got upset that a company was trying to charge too much for a video game. I'm proud to be a geek, but our tendency to get triggered by relatively trivial issues like this while being collectively blind to bigger issues has got to be one of our greater weaknesses.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Seem to be hiding reddit scores now. I guess they got tired of tripping over themselves so publicly.
When you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.
Why try when divorce courts can ruin you and the sense of entitlement and narcissism are off the charts?
...as many have probably already noted...
None of this backlash will matter after the game releases, because enough people will still buy it that EA turns around and does the same thing.
Civilization still has modding take that out and they will kill them self's.
I mean really...
closer to $100ish in today's dollars. Inflation's a bitch.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
To me, the bewildering thing about this story is the 40 hour thing. These people think that's a long time to play a game.
I don't think I'm a "gamer," in that I don't play a lot of games, and I avoid consoles and my gaming machines are an Ubuntu desktop and an Android phone. But for the games that I do play, 40 hours is nothing.
The other thing about the games that I play, is that they're cheap, or I paid $40 for them over a decade ago, or they're "freemium" (like the game in TFA) in that you don't have to pay anything, but can rush through some grinding by throwing a little money (e.g. $10) at it, which I do maybe a couple times per year. (My wife and I play Clash of Clans.)
To think that someone would pay $80 is pretty far out (I've never paid that much for a game) but when you combine that with players thinking they're going to get less than 40 hours of enjoyment out of it -- holy crap, that is so utterly bonkers. You people burn money not even for fun, and then these people are also complaining about it?!
From my PoV, everyone complaining about the 40 hour thing is a total crybaby, who not only doesn't even play games for fun (seemingly) but you're also obsessed with them too. WTF? Anyway, one thing is clear: yes, you shouldn't buy this Star Wars game. But not because of the 40 hour unlock thing; you should be avoiding it because $80 for a game that you've already decided you're not going to play much is a ripoff. Why would anyone buy a game they're not going to play?
In Clash of Clans, you've put in way more than 40 hours before you've even unlocked the first "super" unit (dragons). And then there are so many others after that. I can't even begin to estimate how many hundreds of hours I've put in, and that's just the one game I've been stuck in for a the last couple years. Life has been way longer than that (I'm nearly 50 years old) and I still fire up 1990s games in emulators from time to time. And Dwarf Fortress? Fuck, in a singlepaused, just designing things. Over the lifetime of any game that isn't coin-operated, 40 hours has never been much. (I'll grant you, I probably have not yet played Pac Man for 40 hours so far, to date.)
Anyway, this is definitely one of those weird alien stories, where all the people talking have such twisted values that I can't even slightly identify with them. They seem passionate about games and are willing to pay big money .. for games that they're not even interested in playing. You people aren't from my planet.
If there's any enlightenment here, it's that "gamers" are far less into games than "casuals" are into 'em.
I bet the entire issue of the disappearing American Grad Student would go away.
Huh? I wasn't aware that there was any shortage of grad students. But if you're saying that Americans aren't becoming grad students any more, what's the problem with that? There's a huge amount of work needed to pursue that path, and little if any reward at the end. It's far more prudent to just take your bachelor's or master's and go into private industry and earn a good paycheck. There aren't enough academic jobs out there to support a decent number of grad students, and those jobs suck anyway ("publish or perish").
Indie games rock...
There's good women out there. The problem is, it's hard to find them, and really hard to find one who's attracted to you and that you have enough in common with, and can really trust (as in, she'll help you bury a body). I can see why some men just give up on it. I've seen that a lot with women too, giving up on finding a decent guy. Personally, I think it'd be better if we all gave up on this ideal of monogamy and formed little polyamorous communities or groupings. A lot of people would probably be happier not having one person monopolize all their time and living situation as you get in a monogamous relationship, where it's basically all-or-nothing.
As for games, I agree completely. 80s-90s games are much more enjoyable than modern stuff.
lololololol
So.. roughly 800 hours to unlock them all, right?
I still don't get the objection. Yes, that's quite a while, but that amount of time to finish/master a game doesn't seem nutty to me.
And considering how much the game costs, I'd think most people would expect to put that much time into it; the fact that it keeps you entertained for so long is part of how they justify the price.
I guess it comes down to whether or not the game is actually fun. Are you just grinding those 800 hours or are you enjoying them? Ok, I can sort of imagine the last 200 hours (when you're deciding which minor character to get next) might be a chore, but geez. Only 40 hours for Darth fucking Vader? He's pretty [in]famous, so I bet he's one of the better ones.
If the game isn't fun, it makes sense people are complaining about it (or better yet: just not buying it). But bitching about this 40 hour thing is weird.
This is technically online gambling.
Let's get the fucking gaming commissions in on this along with the Feds, since this lies within the jurisdiction of both. You want to see how fast these nickel-and-dime pay-to-win loot boxes go away? CA and NV gaming commissions are the state-based people you want to complain to.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
They're right, of course, microtransactions are ruining gaming.
But they're all going to play anyway and the launch week numbers will turn out fine, just like every other time gamers have looked like they were about to rebel against EA's anti-consumer bullshit.
0 1 - just my two bits
One thing i'd like to point out is that yes, they have rolled back the amount of credits it takes to purchase a character. HOWEVER, they have also reduced the reward for finishing the campaign from 20,000 credits to a measly 5,000. So in effect they may have lowered the costs by 75% but they've also reduced how quickly you'll earn those credits.
This tactic by EA lets they say they've made "changes", which may lower the amount of time it takes, but it really won't change their bottom line at all. News outlets will pick up the stories that they're "making progress, listening to the users". Where in reality this is all just a PR spin to deflect bad press while still screwing over the community wishes.
"This is why the 60ish bucks you can ask for a game isn't enough."
You my friend brought the EA propaganda hook and sinker. Game with way better graphics than Battlefront 2 , say, witcher 3, cost only 60$ and are way richer in graphics. Battlefront 2 and other EA game are not THAT special, not even the servers and bandwidth. No the real reason 60$ is not enough have nothing to do with cost of production. The main reason are 1) the incredibly increased cost in marketing (sometimes can be as high as 1/3 of the total cost) 2) the pressure the increase shareholder return on investment.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Yeah, you're welcome. ;)
Football is the only thing keeping cable alive, and it is the safety net for EA as well.
EA has a core base of suckers who will buy the same madden/fifa game every year, even better most are "non-gamers" who don't give a shit about what happens in some star wars game.
fifa was the best selling game of 2016, they can afford to take loot box risks on "niche" titles which are full of whales.
I've played plenty of video games where extra things were unlocked after grinding.
I don't get why people buy anything released by EA any more. The pattern has been evolving for years, and only keeps getting worse. The only way this company will ever get itself back in line is if people stop spending money on the drivel this company keeps putting out. I believe the last games I purchased were Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age Inquisition, and that was only because Bioware was attached to those projects. Plus I wanted to see how the Mass Effect trilogy ended, be careful what you wish for. Even then I was wary of the tacked on online component to cover up the online activation, and to incorporate micro-transactions. At least the micro-transactions were easy to avoid. EA has thoroughly infected Bioware, and that name no longer holds meaning to me. EA has swallowed up and destroyed so many good developers, and have even bastardized the name Origin. This is a little outdated, but I'll leave it here anyway. I really can't feel any sympathy for anyone that buys an EA game and then has complaints. And no, I did not buy Mass Effect Andromeda.
http://i.imgur.com/zsj5pZN.png
People still buy their games?
I have a job, a wife, kids, and a home so the very little free time I have is too important to buy a game with micro transactions. When EA releases a full game without this loot box crap call me I may buy it.
Drop their games and play something else. Go outside and kick a soccer ball around.
Have gnu, will travel.
I pay 300-400$ for the console, 60-70$ for a game, a monthly fee to play online, and a monthly fee to play a game. I bought a ps4 last year for family, we never play it because the games suck, they all want you to compete with others online or the controls are unplayable. No real family games. Getting a switch this year, but they drank the charge for internet play Koolaid too. Steam is good but doesn't have mario :-(
EA is about milking every cent they possibly can out of your pocket.
Corporatism != Free Market
Take away the ability to buy credits with real money. Problem solved.
It SHOULD take time to earn/acquire the high level characters. That way it's an actual accomplishment. When you see one in game, you know that person put in some solid game time.
Remove EA's exclusive license to star wars.
The goals of art and of business are mutually exclusive opposites. Business wants to make the target group as large as possible, and as little rubbing anyone the wrong way as possible. But art is about experiences that touch people. Which by definition will be not for everyone, or even controversial. Plus, art tries to optimize for impact, while business optimizes for profit. And, art is made of ideas. You can't exactly control when you will have an idea. While business wants to have *planned creativity* from the assembly line. Which is an oxymoron that cannot possibly work in reality.
Finally, creativity requires a brainstorming space in which all thoughts and every silliness are allowed. Only then is there a chance of getting to the truly creative ideas. While business wants to tread with maximum care, and erects a thousand "can't"s and "must"s, that kill one's creativity qicker than it kills one's boner, to see, emerging from that girl's underpants, another one.
Hence, something stops being art, the moment it becomes a business.
Let's listen to Sid Alpha's video about the situation... and not give them credit for "listening" and making it better.
https://youtu.be/THt3ODESeew
ur ghey fuckin idiot
Four words in the post calling someone stupid, and one is actually spelled properly. Every time I feel bad about myself, I come read the Internet and I am right back on top of the world...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Let those pansy dime a dozen Jedi be cheap. Vader at his peak is the most awesome the Lord of the Sith and should have a befitting price. Plus, he's evil, and evil costs credits {insert evil laugh!}
You are on the wrong website. Go back to ESPN loser.
People want long play and replayability. EA and many others have completely misunderstood and just added a bunch of pointless grinding exercises along with a monetary bypass.
Personally I'm quite okay about ignoring games that pull this shit. Grind stinks, skinner box gambling stinks. But clearly this common sense hasn't permeated the mainstream consciousness or 99% of mobile games wouldn't be this way. I expect EA knows it too.
What we deal with here is something that is, essentially, an impossibility. A gaming corporation. The combination of "gaming", an activity that requires something that is fun, exciting, interesting, and engaging, and "corporation", which is the exact opposite thereof.
It is an interesting parallel to the lack of creativity that we are seeing in Hollywood now. In both cases, large corporations have moved in to an industry built on creativity and art and tried to turn the development processes into assembly lines. And both industries seem to think that fancy graphics can cover for poorly developed products.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
"...to unlock top characters"
Wonderful, except that they also reduced rewards from campaign mode proportionately.
Looks like my 5 year long boycott of EA is going well for me. It started with Origin, and realized that they've gone off the deep end for me.
As a side note it's not JUST EA I don't play, but I'm pretty picky with my games now. They have to have feeling. I've played Breath of the Wild, Odyssey, and quite a few indie games lately, and that's fine with me.
Congratulations, y'all have received another lesson in Sturgeon's Law!
Some old codger who thought life was easy because it was socially acceptable to fuck 12 year olds back then.
Oh you put away childish things? But you still speak, understand, and think like a child.
If you want Jar-Jar, they give you 10,000 credits!
...and "refocused"* the only story-based star wars game on console that people were going to care about, the one Amy Hennig of Uncharted 1-3 was working on
http://www.ign.com/articles/20...
* read: more grinding, loot boxes, with the goal of having the player spend more time and money on the game rather than resell it even with less people doing that as more buy digital
Twinstiq, game news
They don't care what people want if they can use psychology to make enough people want something they can charge for.
All the good women are too busy getting smooth talked by felons who have no intention of giving them even their real name.
Back in the innocent early years of computer game publishing, EA formed in order to exploit a brand new philosophy- "be a total scumbag". Since that time, they have been joined by many other publishers, notably activision and ubisoft. But EA was the first and original. Any fledgling industry will eventually fall prey to such shark logic.
EA tries to sell its 'games' to the same braindead demographic the 'Transformers' movies are made for. Dribbling young males with no intellect or critical faculties. Older, more experienced gamers, even ones of low standards, tire of being bashed over the head by the same dreadful formula.
There's a very good reason the smash hits of the year have been Fornite Battle Royale, and PUBG- both giving multiplayer gamers the shooting game EA, Activision and the other giants refused to. EA see gamers as cattle to be farmed- and hence EA would never dream of asking what the 'cattle' actually want in a game.
But whereas some publishers can change, EA cannot.
Right - strike above and correct to:
completely (but intentionally) misunderstood
Not only did they keep on digging, they're well below Challenger Deep.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
I worked on a sequel to a game that had classes with 5 levels (6th added in expansions). For the sequel, the designers wanted a little more steady progress, so they made 25 levels. Major upgrades happened every 5 levels, but you'd get a few bonus points of health or armor or whatever every level, to make progress feel more steady. Little bits a lot more often. It was balanced to take about the same amount of playtime to get to the top level as the old system, tweaked in playtesting to be as close as possible.
The playerbase freaked. They were, apparently, collectively incapable of understanding that 5 times the levels can be counterbalanced with 5 times the leveling rate. They were convinced it was going to take forever to get to top levels in classes.
It was pretty much par for the course though. It's the kind of game that has "worst game ever!!1!" Steam reviews from people with 3000 hours of playtime. The studio just had to stick to the (true) line that the leveling time was equivalent and let it blow over.
EA found the courage to move to the micro-aggression model of gaming.
You might call it "unregulated gambling", but the underline code is just the function random().
Now regulating that becomes extremely hard if not impossible.
Should WoW monster drops now be considered gambling? Should PUBG random air drop and items found now be considered gambling? Should item box from Mario Kart now be considered gambling? Should Don't Stave random map generating now be considered gambling? Should the simplest game of snake with spawning food dot now be considered gambling?
All of those examples are events/ items that do give the players an advantage in game, each and every one of them. You might not think of them as gambling, but it's the same since you "did" pay for the game, right? Even most nostalgic arcade games have random enemies spawning and you have to pay to revive. They are all gambling in this respect.
This is why the basic definition of gambling is you pay money and can gain money, because drawing a bigger line further opens the worst can of worm ever. Even the japanese made it ok to play games that trades for pinballs, because that is how complex this can go.
I haven't even played Civ IV yet because I'm still playing mods for Civ III
Why are people stil playing EA games? The company has been worthless for gamers for years now.
There are more then enough games, not from EA, worth your time.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
EA just announced they are temporarily disabling micro transactions...until after xmas.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/11...
I didn't reply anymore because you seem to be repeating my conclusion (except by disagreeing my conclusion with a statement that agrees to my conclusion). If you re-read my "GetDropAfter99()" is your "account player expenditure" and " proving the fundamental of random()" is your "There may be random elements". Unless you are trying to prove there's no "math / statistics causing player interaction " which you used an example "how many times you roll a six sided die" to prove there is.
We don't have disagreement here. Our point is the same, so I'll call it good enough.