The industry-wide loot box controversy that reached a fever pitch in late 2017 was brought on by many different games from a variety of different developers. However, one of the biggest examples of misconduct, at least in the eyes of the gaming community, was Star Wars Battlefront 2.
At launch, Battlefront 2 had an incredibly anti-consumer monetization strategy which heavily incentivized players into buying loot boxes so that they could obtain more powerful character abilities (literally paying to win). Now, Battlefront 2 publisher Electronic Arts has spoken about how the loot box controversy affected the studio’s process for making new games.
Speaking in a recent interview with GI.biz, EA’s vice president of strategic growth Matt Bilbey spoke candidly about how the whole loot box fiasco forced the company to take a step back and reevaluate its priorities when it comes to making new games in the future:
“I ran a team internally with [EA chief design officer Patrick Soderlund] post-Battlefront to actually redesign our game development framework and testing platforms to ensure we’re giving our game teams the right guidance–we’ll call it an EA moral compass–at the beginning of development so that we’re designing our live service early, we’re testing it early, testing it with gamers who are giving us feedback so we ensure those pillars of fairness, value, and fun are true.”
Bilbey’s sentiments echoed those of Battlefront 2 design director Dennis Brannvall, who admitted during this year’s E3 that the severely anti-consumer loot box strategy essentially hamstrung the game at launch:
“We launched our game in November of last year and clearly we didn’t get it quite right. Instead of coming out of the gate and sprinting like we really wanted to, we had to take a step back and make sure that we were delivering a game that players really wanted.”
With all that in mind, it’s probably not very surprising to hear that EA’s next major title, Battlefield V, won’t have loot boxes of any kind. Meanwhile, Star Wars Battlefront 2 has been receiving continuous updates in an effort to reshape the game into a more user-friendly experience, the most recent of which brought a certain lightning-infused emperor back from the depths of development purgatory.