T w e n t y S i d e d

On Twitter someone linked me to this video, which tells the history of EA’s pay-to-win shenanigans. It’s a really good video. I know a lot of you don’t come here for video content and tend to skip this sort of thing, but if you get the chance I highly recommend it.

I intended to make a column about this story, but I didn’t have quite enough time to make that happen.

This video really makes me wish I’d spent more time reading EA earnings reports. They’re publicly available, and if you’re willing to sift through the filler and jargon you can learn a lot from them. I read a little a few years ago back when Peter Moore was still running the show. They’re not a lot of fun to read, but given the amount of time I spend slagging the EA leadership I should probably pay more attention to the financial end of the operation.

Sorry to leave you with nothing but a YouTube embed for the column this week. Two of my three kids are moving out today (we’ll be driving them to the bus station when this post goes live) and I spent some of my column-writing time playing Death Road to Canada with the oldest before she leaves.

Consider this an open thread for discussing the video. EA, pay-to-win, loot boxes, the gambling controversy, the quality of their games, etc. Also, if you’re a fan of the FIFA games I’d love to hear what you think of the loot box implementation used there.

I plan to add my thoughts to this next week.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

So over the past week the big story has been the massive backlash against EA for the loot box mechanics on Star Wars: Battlefront II. According to some very conservative estimates, it would take 40 hours of continuous play to unlock Darth Vader as a playable character. This is assuming you save every single point of in-game currency and don’t spend any of them on other things. Then you’d need another 40 hours to unlock Luke Skywalker. Even if you’re just going to save up for a simple loot box, it will take three hours of play.

This is a much slower system of progression than we see in other games, while at the same time the things you’re trying to earn are more substantial than the usual things like cosmetics. It rubbed people pretty raw that they might buy a $60 game and have to grind for a solid week (or pay an additional $20) just to unlock their favorite character.

EA tried to explain or justify the policy on Reddit:

This resulted in the most downvoted comment in the history of Reddit. The previous record was a comment with something in the neighborhood of 23k downvotes. This one got over 600k, smashing the old record by an order of magnitude. You can’t dismiss this as a vocal minority on Reddit, either. In the UK, physical sales of Battlefront II are down 60% compared to the previous entry in the series. We can’t prove that worldwide sales are down by the same ammount, although I can’t think of why sales would ONLY be down in the UK. Either way, it’s certainly troubling.

The controversy burned for a few days and was even picked up by major mainstream news outlets. Perhaps in response to this, EA disabled all microtransactions within the game. (For now.) Polygon suggested that this was in response to pressure from Disney, who perhaps don’t appreciate EA tarnishing their brand after the two entered into an exclusive deal a few years ago. While that article sounds plausible, it’s just conjecture. The reversal could also be due to low sales, or concerns that shareholders were getting nervous due to the negative press.

So that’s where the story stands now. EA is in the doghouse, sales are down, microtransaction loot boxes are disabled, and the community doesn’t know if EA is going to give them what they want (something fun) or just wait for the heat to die down and re-enable the system with some minor tweaks.

People are celebrating this as a victory, but I don’t see much to cheer about. EA is still run by a defective corporate culture, which means all of the uninformed people that made this happen will be making decisions down the road. It’s not a victory until there’s a serious shakeup inside the EA leadership, and I don’t think this controversy is big enough to make that happen.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “This Dumb Industry: No, We Didn’t Beat EA”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I had a pretty good run over at the Escapist. I was a contributor there from 2008 to 2016. I made comics, wrote a weekly column that ran for 265 installments, and posted a few Let’s Plays which I’ve since reposted here on the blog.

Sadly, The Escapist is sorta-dead. Most of the staff is gone and aside from Zero Punctuation there’s not really much new content. While nobody has said so explicitly, I get the impression that the current owners will keep the site up as long as it brings in enough traffic to pay for its own overhead, and there’s no telling how long that will be. It could be years, or the whole place might just vanish the next time the domain registration comes due.

These days I have two problems:

1. I don’t always have a good topic for my weekly Tuesday column.
2. I’ve got some good topics in the archives over there, and now that the site is in zombie mode that content doesn’t get much (any) traffic.

So what I’m planning on doing is cribbing from those old columns for new content. I don’t plan on doing a copy / paste job. Most columns were linked to the news of the day, which makes them kind of stale by now. Also, I don’t want to match the content at The Escapist word-for-word, since Google tends to recognize this as bot behavior and lower your page rank accordingly.

But I do plan on taking those old topics, reusing their best points, and rewriting them to make new content. I’m pointing this out now so you don’t worry I’ve gone senile when I start revisiting old ideas.

I already have a couple of old columns picked out that I plan to refurbish over the next few weeks. If you’ve got any favorites you’d like to see me revisit – or just a request that I cover a specific topic – let me know in the comments below.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.