There’s a difference between making a mistake and making an error in judgment. In video games, a mistake may be a small bug or glitch. Unfortunate to see happen, but it can be fixed. An error in judgment is often something that changes the game for the worst, and because of that, the players become angry. This is clearly something that happened with EA and their developers with Star Wars Battlefront II. For their error in judgment about the Loot Boxes and progression system led to a lot of backlash.
This started with EA trying to defend themselves, and the fans shooting holes in their explanations. After that came the shutdown of the microtransactions system (which only recently came back on), and a major revamp of the progression system. So, did EA learn from all of this? Well, according to Patrick Söderlund, they did. He told the Verge:
“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,” he explains. “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.”
This confession will likely please many gamers, but the gamers should be warned that even with this failure to use Loot Boxes correctly it doesn’t mean that EA is going to shy away from using them in the future. And EA seems to indicate that they’ll be doing massive thinking for a potential Battlefront III.
People seem to think that for the most part, we got it right. It doesn’t mean we will stop. We’ll continue to improve the game, we’ll continue to push on these things, and we’ll have to be very cautious with what this means for future products.
What do you think of all this? Let us know in the comments below.
