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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.
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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.
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.
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.
I think we are currently witnessing it.
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. The reason it managed to stay afloat is in the case of EA mostly that they keep hoovering up studios and franchises that actually give players fun, exiting, interesting and engaging games and "corporatize" them, i.e. milk them dry and shell out lines of rehashed sequels that are, essentially, the same game with some minor, insignificant gimmick, sold to fans of the line as new angle. That works for some time, and afterwards, they just throw away the franchise and studio and continue with the next.
All this only works if they up the technical angle. Better graphics. Better sound. Better physics. Better textures. Better AI. Because the game is still essentially the same. It has to be. They bought the franchise and players do have a certain expectation for it. Dare to make a RTS Battlefield spinoff? Remember how Command & Conquer: Renegade was received when Westwood tried the opposite? Don't even think about it. There is no way to "improve" the gameplay.
And all these things, graphics, sound, physics, textures and AI, they are prohibitively expensive. Note how those Indie-Games you like so much all come with mediocre graphics (if they're not even one of those "pixel graphics" rubbish that for some odd reason is so en vogue right now) and generally tech specs from the 2000s? Unlike EA, indies can actually go for "better gameplay". EA has to toss funds into the graphics/sound/physics/AI money sink.
This is why the 60ish bucks you can ask for a game isn't enough. Not even close. But 100 bucks isn't a price tag even the most devout fanboy would pay for a game. So they go for boiling the frog slowly. Pay 60 now, then 5 bucks here, 10 bucks there, 20 for the DLC (that is oddly available from day 1 and the game can't sensibly be played without), then every other month another 10 for the new guns that you need if you want to play online and don't want to be cannon fodder.
This does still work. Or rather, as we see right here and right now, it does not anymore. Gamers are not only fed up. They start voting with their wallet. They don't want to play games that cost them 200+ bucks only to find out that they threw that money into the gutter eventually because EA turns off the servers to play it because you're supposed to buy the successor for 60 bucks that is essentially the same game but with another 150 bucks of DLCs waiting to be bought.
I have this feeling that we're about to see this business model come to an end.
At the same time this could well be the death spell for corporations like EA. Their business model is, as stated before, watching which franchises work, buy out the studio, then milk it. This isn't viable anymore if people don't accept the "pay while you play" model with upfront costs that cannot be covered with a price tag of 60 bucks.
And corporations are like oil tankers. Hard to turn around once they have a course set.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yeah, but that can actually be a good thing. I am playing a few early access games that change every other month, get better and better, get more and more features, some of them being a totally new game every half year or so, all for the price of a pizza.
Granted, sometimes I get a stale pizza, but in the end, I come out ahead. And way ahead of any AAA titles I ever bought.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not really, though I don't play these types of games anymore. I did way back in the Quake/RoTT/etc era though. People who are into the pvp-mmo style stuff can sink hundreds or thousands of hours into it. The top 5 games in my steam list are Skyrim, Fallout:NV, Stellaris, Civ4 and Star Trek Online those each top out between 400-1k hours each. A few of my friends have 600-700 hours in various CoD games.
What's happening though is people are having enough with the microtransactions, and then developers blaming gamers when there's a backlash, along with the gaming press screeching that "they're entitled brats" or some other type of garbage. There was a similar backlash against the ME3 ending for good reason, especially when game sites called gamers entitled. Same with the stuff over Kane & Lynch and then there's the Dorito Pope. People got a taste of that whole incestuous backlash with gamergate and sites screaming "gamers are dead, they don't have to be your audience" and so on. This is likely going to be just as big at the rate EA is doubling down on it.
Om, nomnomnom...
EA existed (and was hated) long before DLC and microtransactions were a thing.
Computer games designed and sold by corporations are an old thing, corporations isn't incompatible with fun. The idea is ridiculous - many old games that is still spoken about as innovative, fun by nostalgic geeks were in almost all cases designed by and distributed by specialized game development companies. Including EA.
And about franchises not being able to change: Fallout. Heard of it?
The idea is ridiculous - many old games that is still spoken about as innovative, fun by nostalgic geeks were in almost all cases designed by and distributed by specialized game development companies. Including EA.
I'm reminded of older games, and even new games, when I read these.
The complaint is that it takes about 40 hours of gameplay to unlock. Similar multiplayer match games report that mainstream players often spend 15-20 hours per week for about a month, then settle to about 10 hours per week until the games fall out of favor. Their hardcore players can log 80+ hours per week. This means many players would be able to unlock one hero before the end of November, and hardcore gamer teens will likely unlock one or two before Thanksgiving. Most players will unlock two or three before Christmas, hardcore gamers could unlock all the heroes before Christmas under the old structure.
In the older games the high-end unlockables were not available until near the end of the game, often requiring 100+ hours to achieve. And those were single player games played once, not the online match games where statistically people replay them for over a thousand hours on average before moving on.
With the update math suggests they're unlocked with about six hours of gameplay. All of them can be unlocked with 80 hours of gameplay, meaning hardcore players will likely have them all unlocked before the Thanksgiving holiday is over, more casual players can have every character unlocked before Christmas. Far too easy for such a long-running game, in my view.
I think EA was trying to bypass the claims that only the unemployed teens devoting extended hours to the game could unlock those characters, so they added an alternate way to achieve them. Players have been calling for this type of unlock for years, and few games offer it. At 40 hours to unlock and $80 for Darth Vader, that's about $2/hour. Lesser characters were closer to $1/hour or $0.50/hour. While I rarely buy in-game content, those prices don't feel outlandish. Unfortunately and ironically, by providing exactly the thing the players demand, the players revolted.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
I'd argue this is more a result of most consumers being so young.
I worked at gamestop about 10 years ago. Kids would bring in their entire collection, would get $10 for 20 games. Well worn copies of good games they obviously loved and had value "I can only give you $2 for this game you've obviously put at least a hundred hours into." They just stood there, either staring at me waiting for me to give them the shiny new game in exchange for their memories or staring directly at the game waiting to play it.
Kids have more money than taste. I was that way when I was buying "Hootie and the blowfish" or "Ace of Base" CDs with my money from mowing the lawn, my parents were like that when they were trading baseball cards. It's just a fact of life that kids make dumb decisions with their purchases.
That it's messing up entertainment for the rest of us isn't even new. Music has been catering to the young and dumb crowd again for generations. See my above musical tastes.
What is new is that gamers are starting to age to a point where we're whining about the good old days, AND have a forum to whine about it collectively.
I can think of a good example of DLC done right: Rocksmith 2014. If you haven't heard of Rocksmith it's basically Rock Band or Guitar Hero with a real guitar and you're actually playing the song. Every week they release a song pack, 3-5 songs. They're up to about 1100 songs total. I've shelled out several grand over the years on this and am happy to do so, it's worth every penny to me. I get to cherry pick the songs I like and they all fit in a single game. I can start a random list and play till my fingers bleed (feels so good)