Star Wars Battlefront II Is Blowing Up The Spot On Video Game Gambling
By: Miguel Moran
Tags: Gaming, Gambling, Star Wars, Overwatch, Video Game News

Want to know how a Star Wars video game led to the most down-voted Reddit comment of all time? Or how they got the attention of the UK Gambling Commission? It’s all the culmination of a witch’s brew made from game developer desperation, game publisher greed, and consumer frustration reaching a boiling point. The reason for this messy mixture to come together? Video game loot boxes.

There’s been a lot of big news and developing stories in the video game industry in 2017, but one of the biggest, especially in recent months, has got to be the loot box fiascos. If the phrase “loot box” barely sounds like English to you or you just want a light recap on the history and details of the practice, I’ve got an informative video just above, and an equally informative mini podcast episode right below.

A long time ago…

It seems like every day these last few months, there’s been another loot box debacle or box backlash from fans and critics. None of this started in 2017, though. At least, loot boxes certainly didn’t.

For decades, the game industry has built up and standardized a multitude of ways to get more out of the player’s pocket than just their initial $60. Before our current days of speedy digital data access, game developers would put out beefy disc-based expansion packs for existing games.

Eventually, internet got fast enough that those packs could just be sold digitally. Then, people realized that you didn’t just have to sell massive game-changing bundles with big price tags. They could just sell a piece of horse armor for $2.50.

From there, developers and publishers continued forging methods to get more money from consumers at little cost to the developers. Microtransactions began cropping up in the last 10 years, asking you to pay a dollar for a tiny item or gameplay boost. In the last 5 or so years, though, loot boxes took that idea one step further; instead of paying a dollar and getting the thing you want, why don’t you pay a dollar for the random chance to get what you’re looking for?

Chicken dinner arms race.

Lootboxes cropped up in games here and there for a while, mostly in free games like Team Fortress 2. However, as more people started noticing that this was where the money was at, it seems like every game going into development, free or priced, was being created with the implementation of loot boxes very much in mind.

Games take years to develop, though, so it would take a while before the industry truly saw a massive shift. Full-priced games here and there would drop with loot box implementation, but in 2017, it finally seemed like every major game in the Holiday season was anchored by loot boxes.

Every anticipated release of late 2017 seemed to be mired in some sort of shady practices. Forza 7 released on October 3rd, and to the surprise of nobody, allowed you to purchase loot boxes.

The ugliness, however, came from the way the game was changed to bring focus to obtaining lootboxes. While previous Forza games let you tweak difficulty options and rewarded you with more in-game currency for using less assists, Forza 7 relegated these difficulty bonuses to single-use card abilities. How do you get more of of those one-time use cards? Oh, right, loot boxes!

Then came the hot Lord of the Rings sequel Shadow of War, a single-player game that, oh, weird, sold some loot crates! These crates gave you new orc allies to use in-game, but many people didn’t see the need for them in the regular game.

Unfortunately, to see the real ending to the story of the game, you need to beat a lengthy bonus mode that requires incredibly powerful orcs with a variety of different skills. Don’t want to buy boxes now? That’s fine, you’ll just be spending triple the amount of time playing this mode to watch a 3 minute video.

These issues and a few more came to light, and they would have been minor in the long run if they were isolated events. They weren’t, however, and they only served to dig a deeper ditch between game consumers and game publishers.

Then, with Star Wars Battlefront II, that ditch became the Grand Canyon.

Shit hits the thermal exhaust port.

The 2015 game Star Wars Battlefront made extra revenue through the sales of a season pass that gave purchasers a wealth of new maps, characters, and weapons throughout the year. Fans felt that charging for this content only split up the community, however, and so with Battlefront 2, EA promised that all of that content would be free.

To make up for the lack of season pass revenue, though, Battlefront II introduced you-know-whats to the game. Loot boxes in Battlefront II seemed especially grimy, though, because the rewards were all abilities and stat-boosts. Selling things like these, people felt, would introduce an unfair advantage for players who simply spent a bunch of money on boxes.

As the game came to launch, dedicated fans crunched the numbers on how the game rewards players, discovering shocking data such as the fact that it takes roughly 40 hours just to unlock a single character.

Many games with loot boxes tend to have them give purely cosmetic rewards that don’t interfere with gameplay, and consumers usually favor that kind of approach. Look at Overwatch, a game with cosmetic-only loot boxes that crossed $1 billion in revenue in only a year. EA soured a lot of people with their loot box methods, and those people were vocal about it.

Band-aid on a bullet wound.

Fans and critics publicly expressed their outrage or concern, and on November 12th, just a few days before the game was set to be released, a representative from EA chose to respond to a specific harsh post about the game on Reddit. In the comment, the representative briefly explained that “ The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.”

People didn’t appreciate that.

The comment was quickly flooded with negative votes, and within just a few hours, had become the most negatively voted comment in the history of Reddit. EA quickly caught wind of the negative press they were receiving, and just a day later, announced that they were cutting the costs to unlock heroes in the game to a quarter of their original price.

Then, 3 days later, hours before the game was about to launch globally, they announced that they would be removing “all in-game purchases” from the video game. In the same announcement, however, EA noted that in-game purchases “will become available at a later date, only after we’ve made changes to the game.”

Once again, fans and critics alike were hardly satisfied. In the eyes of many, EA was doing too little, too late, and it seemed like their primary concern was still bleeding bank accounts. They were simply going to have to do it later, instead of now.

One of these days…

All of this is still unfolding today. It remains unclear why their loot box machinations were so messy, especially with so many parties involved in the game. EA published it, but the Star Wars rights belong to Disney, who are reported to have been “alarmed” by the situation, especially with the new Star Wars film dropping in theaters in the next few weeks.

Consumer outcry over the practice is louder than ever, and multiple government figures are beginning to chime in. There are parallels to the video game age-rating panic of the 90s due to violent games like Mortal Kombat. In that situation, the game industry developed the self-governing body known as the ESRB to keep government control away from video games. Today, however, that very same group insists there is nothing wrong with loot boxes, despite the majority saying otherwise.

It’s hard to say where any of this will lead, or when the camel’s back will truly break on loot boxes. Game prices have remained the same for years, yet development budgets have gone way up. More income has to come from somewhere, and if loot boxes aren’t the answer, it’s up to everyone involved in the industry to devise a method that is, before the matter is taken out of our hands entirely by government officials.