Boycott EA Games - A Tribute To The Gamer Community
In this article I will discuss the recent EA Star Wars BF2 scandal and how the gamer community fought back.
Do You know what Micro-transactions are?
It is a painfully well-known word in the gaming world.
It started out as a harmless monetization scheme within mobile games: You start out with many features such as heroes or weapons locked in the game. As you progress, you collect rewards like chests and gifts which contain the unlockable game features.
However, it usually involves some kind of a waiting element - like waiting several hours to unlock your rewards chest. Players who want to skip the waiting, may skip this step by kindly purchasing game points in exchange for fiat money payments.
This has become a sad reality of almost all games these days and it has evolved way beyond the mobile platforms. Various psychological tricks have been applied to lure players into spending their money to progress within the game, often preying on human flaws such as gambling addiction and the naiveté of minors.
You might think that this is bad as it is already - Well, EA disagrees.
EA Takes it to the next level
In the new released Star Wars Battlefront II, players are "allowed" to earn and purchase credits to unlock in-game items. The painfully locked content comes at a price of $60 and doesn't even provide you the most interesting characters such as Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. Really?
That is pretty much the equivalent of purchasing a car and finding out that you have to pay extra for the steering wheel.
After making some calculations a player found out that you would have to spend 4,528 Hours play time or $2,100 to unlock all items in the game.
Are you serious EA?
The Gamers voiced their frustration
One outraged player posted on the Battlefront subreddit and got a lot of attention.
And was rewarded with the most dishonest, disingenuous and cowardly reply in internet history.
Within hours this became the most downvoted comment in Reddit history, and quite rightfully so.
The gamers did not buy this attempt at a justification of a malicious in-game economy and responded.
The power of community
The reddit thread was soon flooded with comments of gamers who felt betrayed by EA and their greedy managers. Soon the EA support team was overwhelmed with requests for refund and return of the shitty excuse of a game.
The gamers have had enough.
Threads followed calling for a EA boycott and many fans have since abandoned the company.
The aftermath
After the strong backlash from the community EA temporarily disabled all micro-transactions.
A few weeks later they reduced the items prices by 75%. That is a positive improvement, however the broken trust is far from restored. The EA brand took a massive PR hit as many gamers left EA for good and encouraged others to follow.
What the managers forgot, while pressuring the developers to design the game to squeeze for profit, is that when you monetize a game beyond all limits, you rob the game of it's most vital element - fun.
I am very proud to see this accomplishment in the gamer community - standing up to corporate greed and fighting for whats right - and I hope to see and read more of this in the future.
Information sources:
http://inc-asean.com
https://motherboard.vice.com
Legendary Reddit Thread
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- Nick ( @cryptonik ) -
I understand the in game purchases if the game was free but to fork over $60 and then have the developer ask for more is insulting. Glad to see people fighting back.
I feel there are a lot of other areas where people need to get pissed though. A big one that chaps my ass because my wife is in the industry is Adobe forcing everyone onto the "creative cloud" so you have to pay for the same software every year. And because the graphic design and print industries are so dominated by that software you can't switch to a different software company even if you wanted because of file compatibility issues.
We are sharing the same thought,
I wanted to store this moment, because it felt like a real victory. The gaming community came together and managed to make a real long-lasting impact. EA will not forget this lesson. However, I would like to see this much needed action happen in other, more important areas too such as environment protection.
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great content man
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