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

Apparantely loot boxes and paywalls are worse than abuse of child labor laws and underpaying employees.

I try to avoid reveling in schadenfreude too much, but I genuinely hope Battlefront II is a disaster. The only way we'll see any change is if it dramatically under-performs.

But, realistically, it's far more likely to be very successful. Particularly because of the hefty micro-transaction pricetags. It only takes a small number of people paying enormous amounts of money to make up for the few of us that will take an actual pass on buying the game.

Again, maybe true in the abstract but the consumers are mobilizing in an unprecedented way this time. The sheer numbers are suggesting millions in losses.

True. Plus that whole worst voted company thing is a sham anyways. What would EA not winning such a contest against organizations like banks and the like actually do? I mean, EA's won it for several years running and they are still around pulling the same crap. What would it matter that a company like Bank of America (for instance) won, really?

"Oh Bank of America really sucks, so here's you turd shaped trophy and hopefully you will feel bad and change your ways."

Are you sure Comcast or BoA isn’t still straddling the top of the mountain here? EA, for all their fuckery, is still largely small potatoes compared to them. I can see gaming blogs throwing their ballots together to determine EA is truly run by Satan himself (JP Morgan Chase is btw), but, well, no one really cares. 

I'll hold my breath on any meaningful positive effect; even if a decent number of well-placed people within EA come around to the realization that they're alienating their most consistent fans, they seem to have settled pretty firmly into the microtransaction business model. They'll have to hemorrhage a lot of money to make major changes.

Foolish on my part I know, but I thought when EA had finally deigned to change up the loot boxes thing that they had been forced to change their crappy business practices, and then this happened.

I wonder though, was the whole hero locking thing part of the game, or if it was something that they implemented after they backed off on the loot box kerfuffle?  

In terms of publishers being able to exploit consumers, video games are in a pretty bad place, and it looks like it's only getting worse. It might be because I watch this one YouTuber who definitely has an agenda against over monetization, but it seems like publishers are beginning to understand more and more about how to effectively monetize their games and how to push boundaries. In an oversimplified explanation, the ability to own intellectual properties has set up the industry in such a way so that if I want to play an Assassin's Creed game (just as an example), I have to buy the game from Ubisoft no matter what their policies are on microtransactions. In an alternate model where IPs aren't exclusive to any developer or publisher, I could perhaps buy a similar AC game from a dev/pub that treats it's customers better. In the current market, the best I can do is boycott the game, but it's very difficult for me to boycott a series that I already have so much invested in. I still think IPs are something that companies should own, to drive innovation. On the other hand, the only way I see the state of monetization turning around is many players boycott (which can be difficult as I mentioned), larger dev/pubs develop have a crisis of conscience, or the government or some other agency steps in with greater regulations. And monetization itself isn't necessarly bad. Free-to-play games need to find some way to at least break even. But if you've already paid $60+ for a game, I feel like the spending should just stop there. Maybe the microtranactions are supposed to make up for the fact that video game prices haven't increased much over the last few decades (I remember PS1 games being $40...I think?). Dunno. Overall, I'm very aware that I'm just fueling the problem by continuing to support these practices by buying games where microtransactions are prevalent, but at the same time I'm not committed enough to boycott them.

This one CoD trailer was the most disliked vid on U-Tube, too - it still sold.

To give some perspective on how far this whole situation has fallen, apparently Star Wars HQ is even giving some criticism towards the game.

www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cnovt/you_know_shit_hit_the_fan_when_even_star_wars_hq/

Looks like the "games need MT to turn profit" - spin didn't really cut it.