It’s an understatement to say that EA completely botched Battlefront II’s launch. The company completely ignored all of the angry feedback from its players, didn’t care much to read the poor reviews, and just kept pushing its pay-to-win progression system. It’s worth mentioning that EA’s decision to remove MTX from its game just hours before launch wasn’t due to good will, but rather a phone call from Disney forced the company’s hand to remove it. It doesn’t look like micro-transactions will make its way back to to Star Wars Battlefront II after all.
At the 37th Nasdaq Investor Conference on Tuesday, EA CFO Blake Jorgensen spoke a bit about what EA was doing to better the situations after a completely disastrous Battlefront II launch. Here’s what he said:
We’re working on improving the progression system. We turned the MTX off as an opportunity to work on the progression system inside the game. We’re continuing to do that. I think there’s an update this week and again next week. Over time we’ll address how we will want to bring the MTX either into the game or not and what form we will decide to bring it into.
Previously, EA had said that it would re-enable micro-transactions in the future and that the disabling of them previously was temporary. The statement from Jorgensen is a good sign because it’s different from what was previously said by the company. During the entire event, he repeatedly said that this had been “a great learning experience for us,” and further added that “we consider ourselves a learning organization, and if we’re not learning we’re failing in some way.”
EA’s previous move to announce that micro-transactions would again return in the future brought even more problems. As soon as gamers heard that EA was going to tue the entire progression system to loot crates, the player community revolted. For example, when players realized that it would take 40 hours to unlock on iconic Star Wars hero because credits were awarded in very small amounts, EA didn’t listen and continued to do as it pleased.
It didn’t help EA that when reviews came in, its PR situation kept getting worse. Multiple publications slated the progression system and the big difference between people who had top-tier Star Cards and those that didn’t. The pay-to-win economy wasn’t sitting well with players and critics, and many reviews mentioned how terrible the game’s progression system was.
