It’s been a heck of a week for EA leading up to the release of Star Wars Battlefront II. The game has been ridiculed by fans for some time about the features in the game. Primarily the in-game purchases that, in many players minds, made the game “Pay-2-Win”. Add that to an absolutely brutal progression system and high costs of in-game items, and you can see why fans protested. And EA heard them all, and decided to lower the costs of Heroes in the game, and stop microtransactions for the time being.
These moves have been getting a lot of attention, as well as a bunch of rumors. Including, but not limited to, Disney itself being the reason that the microtransactions were forced to stop, as Disney didn’t like what EA was doing, and made them stop it.
And now, we’re hearing what Lucasfilm has to say on things. They too appear to have been concerned with what EA was doing with the game, but it’s unclear if they tried to force their hand as well. However, they do fully support what EA did in stopping the microtransactions:
“Star Wars has always been about the fans—and whether it’s Battlefront or any other Star Wars experience, they come first.”
But wait! There’s more. With all the changes, many have wondered how the game would handle all the bad publicity in terms of sales. Well, in the UK, Forbes is reporting that sales are very much down compared to not only the previous Battlefront game, but also compared to other shooters like Battlefield 1. Apparently, sales are 61% lower than what they were at launch in 2015 for the previous game.
Now, that number only covers physical sales to be fair, but even with digital sales, it’s very unlikely that they made up that massive of a gap.
It’s going to be interesting to see what Battlefront II is like going forward.
