Star Wars Battlefront 2 has had a troubled marketing campaign to say the least. The latest twist in the story is that Publisher Electronic Arts has decided to pull the in-game purchase feature from the title; at least until it can figure out how to implement the system without angering fans even more.
Troubles concerning BF2 began when EA announced that it would be selling lootboxes for the game. These would contain powerful character upgrades, allowing those who opened them to gain the upper hand in online multiplayer games. Naturally, the lootboxes favoured people who could spend a lot of money on them.
This decision was later revised to reduce the impact of lootboxes and allow the best power up cards to be earned by playing the game.
Things later heated up when players discovered that unlocking named characters within the game would require at least 40 hours of gameplay; while unlocking all content would take over 2800 hours. Of course, EA was also selling in-game currency that would allow players to achieve all of this faster.
A post justifying the business decision soon became the most downvoted comment in Reddit history. Spurring thousands of players to cancel their preorders of the game.
Which is where we are today. EA completely pulling in-game purchases for fear of further damaging sales of its flagship title for the holiday season. It’s unknown how many preorders were cancelled, but it looks like the campaign against the company was extremely successful.
That’s not to say that lootboxes are gone from BF2. The statement from DICE indicates that in-game purchases are still on the table, and will be making a comeback when the developers figure out what to do.
[Source: Electronic Arts (Twitter)]
