Star Wars: Battlefront II (The villagers are outside with pitchforks and torches)

It’s a Star Wars game, they aren’t in any real danger of losing money on it. The most we can hope for is that it falls below expectations. Hopefully it does and EA is discouraged from attempting such intrusive and predatory microtransactions.

Well that is why I would want you on. 

My dream podcast/ RP talk would be you, me, Iakus, Sylvius, and Alec just chatting about random stuff, with maybe a guest or two every so often to round it out.

Imagine the conversations there...

Yes, but I still doubt it’s enough to actually have EA lose money on this game.

At any rate, I’ll be interested to see how EA talks about this at their next earnings call

There have been Star Wars flops before and even if it doesn't flop if it doesn't generate profit, its still a failure.

I honestly think that is likely at this point. The reception has hit physical sales as we saw already, and I am sure it will also hit digital and micro too.

all you needed to complete plat games was the starter gear and time then they changed the maps and it became impossible... that was because they wanted to sell more boxes to cash players....

to start off with microtransactions were fine in me3mp, you didn't gain anything from spending cash that you couldn't obtain through playing the game, then things got "tweaked" to mean if you didn't spend cash you wernt going to be moving up to the next level .... DAI you got no real benefit from spending cash you needed to play certain maps to get the best gear....

with BF2 if you don't spend cash your not going to progress for months and to make it worse you need to spend a lot of cash to get there, if all you needed was to blow an extra $20 to get there it wouldn't be so bad, but you need to spend a couple of hundred or be left months behind ..... folks prefer to spend cash on new map packs, or up to $2 on new gear skins that give a bonus (which is how cod did it) 

the real problem is not the fact that micro transactions exist or the fact you can obtain epic level gear way ahead of your peers that don't use them its the price scale to get stuff and the feeling that your forced into using them in order to be competitive.... this is the same reason why EVE online was such a bad game for new players they had zero chance of getting anywhere or achieving anything because there was no way to compete with long term players... its the same reason why many games fail massively through falling population, BF2 is literally going to be a ghost town of a few cash whores that "pwnt the noobz" at every turn driving them out of the game.....

EA's bad choices have screwed up massively because they have experiences with other games that used a different progression model where random loot crate type stuff didn't ruin things for anyone (in the mass effect and dai mp's this was primarily because your purely playing co-op so one guy wasting a few thousand dollars to gain all the leet gear at x was never a problem) and that makes a huge difference in terms of how players at large view the addition of "micro transactions".... not that you can call flogging loot crates for those prices as micro transactions, when the game is free you can maybe justify having a lottery box option that costs more than $25, but not when your charging $60 for the base game as well .....

On top of the M$ debacle, for what I've seen on Twitch, the game crashes a lot, the tickrate is a pathetic 30 which creates a lot of issues in the gunplay and there's also a lot of lag related with the servers.
So, if the game didn't have enough problems, it also has technical issues. We're talking a released game now, not a beta.

That was the biggest problem with the last game, it was more of a Beta than an actual game.

Well that didn't take long. But indeed, it will be interesting if other parties begin taking a look at this as well.

The article is a bit mis-leading.

Thankfully we have someone on our staff who can translate Flemish for us, he basically noted that the commission thinks they are gambling because it's being predatory specifically on children, to paraphrase it.

Belgium apparently views games as kid toys, according to our staffer.

That said, it has to go through to the EU for it to really administer a change. PEGI has also noted that they don't see Loot Boxes as Gambling, but they will change their parameters if other country gaming commissions do. 

So what is likely here depends not necessarily on implementation, but just compliance with the law. This may go down the China route...