In 2017, one of the biggest controversies of the year came from the realm of video games, which is saying something when you think about it. EA and DICE launched their highly anticipated game Star Wars Battlefront II on systems, but leading into it, a disturbing trend was noted by beta testers. Mainly, there was a “Pay-2-Win” system in place via Loot Boxes and Crates. It got so bad that not only was EA forced to turn off their microtransaction system, but they were put under fire by governments around the world who tried to ban such practices under the label of “Gambling”.
While countries like US and UK have not gone that far, other countries have, and it’s made EA rethink how they do things. This was noted by EA’s Andrew Wilson, who talked with Gameindustry.biz about their change in perspective:
“I believe what we’re working through with those specific groups at the moment is an education. Not meant in a patronizing way, but just helping them understand how we design the games and the notion of choice and our commitment to making the games fair and fun. We learned a lot from Star Wars: Battlefront.“
EA was so changed by their Battlefront II experience that Wilson notes that they now run things with a “moral compass”, using the game’s post-launch experience as an example:
“I ran a team internally with Patrick post-Battlefront to actually redesign our game development framework and testing platforms to ensure we’re giving our game teams the right guidance—we’ll call it an EA moral compass—at the beginning of development so that we’re designing our live service early, we’re testing it early, testing it with gamers who are giving us feedback so we ensure those pillars of fairness, value, and fun are true.”
The real question though is whether it’ll stick, or whether they’ll return to their Loot Box overload form in the future.
