Before we begin, I would like to prefix that a lot of this article is opinionated and does not reflect the thoughts of the companies mentions or The Tanooki as a whole. The letters “E” and “A” elicit a lot of emotions from the gaming community: there’s anger, frustration, and disappointment, just to name a few. Last year, it was pure agony. After mucking up their first attempt at reviving the Star Wars Battlefront series by releasing half a game, fans were hoping that EA would learn from their mistakes and get it right with Star Wars Battlefront II.
It turned into one of the biggest disasters in recent gaming history as EA tried to lock pivotal content behind the newest money making craze in the gaming community: loot boxes. EA worked to explain itself and the practices on Reddit only to have its response become the most downvoted post in Reddit history. The game sold well below expectations, and you can now find it relatively cheap just five months after its release so EA can try to boast good sales numbers.
So you’ll excuse me for having ghe opinion that this comment from EA’s Patrick Söderlund might be a load of crap. In an interview with The Verge, Söderlund explained, “I’d be lying to you if I said that what’s happened with Battlefront and what’s happened with everything surrounding loot boxes and these things haven’t had an effect on EA as a company and an effect on us as management. We can shy away from it and pretend like it didn’t happen, or we can act responsibly and realize that we made some mistakes, and try to rectify those mistakes and learn from them.”
I don’t buy it. Not one bit. Let’s remember this is EA we are talking about here: a company that last year did the same thing it did with Battlefront II with Need For Speed: Payback. It’s a company that buys a studio, uses business decisions to run their franchises into the ground, and then kills them for not being able to hit sales figures. They’ve never cared about what the consumer thinks. If they did, the whole loot box incident wouldn’t have happened in the first place. The only reason Söderlund said anything was to save face because he knows that they were debating doing loot boxes again until Battlefront II blew up in their faces.
The thing that bothers me about EA is that they never learn the most crucial lesson of video game development: listen to your development team. If the development team thinks adding microtransactions is a bad idea, you should probably listen to it since they are making the game. DICE supposedly warned the higher ups at EA that adding the loot box system into the game would throw everything off, but it was done anyway. Visceral supposedly was wary of taking Dead Space 3 and making it co-op, but since the suits saw that multiplayer was all the rage they ordered them to do it anyway, then dared to blame Visceral when sales numbers were down for the third installment when it was single player focused until three!
Time and time again, EA showcases that they never learn from the mistakes of theirs. They never listen to their development teams and instead look to data as to how to make the most profit, not the best game. EA can say all they want that they learned from their mistakes on Battlefront II, but I bet good money that we’ll be singing this same tune next year. When the next Battlefield installment comes out, and you have to drop an obscene amount of money to unlock enough loot boxes to get everything in the game.
When they do inevitably do that, I’ll be laughing at the internet roasting them and the articles explaining how their shareholders are worried that they won’t hit their marks. Should we call it something? Perhaps the “EA Circus of Stupidity!” Maybe I can sell that to them by the word for $2 a pop?
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