Well, it seems that's exactly what happened, according to SegmentNext:
Disney might have saved EA from an even bigger catastrophe before the game released, according to Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Fritz. Apparently, Disney called EA to let them know how displeased they were about the handling of the Battlefront 2 microtransactions.
Battlefront 2 had a rather disastrous launch after it came out that EA was adding in a great deal of grinding to Battlefront 2 in order to unlock well-known heroes like Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. Fritz apparently wrote an article that talked about how Disney contacted EA to let them know about Disney CEO Bob Igner’s “worry” about their handling of the game.
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This isn’t the only Star Wars game that EA has mucked up recently either, after they canned production of a Star Wars game developed by Visceral Games that was originally going to be single-player and story-driven in favor of a multiplayer-focused game, which sparked its own debate about how relevant single-player games were in this day and age with games like Horizon Zero Dawn, Assassin’s Creed Origins, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, and more being given as pro-single player examples.Lucasfilm eventually released a short, boilerplate PR statement confirming that they "support EA’s decision," but the simple reality is that EA probably wouldn't have made this decision if Disney hadn't weighed in. EA may be one of the biggest companies in videogames right now, but they're minnows compared to Disney... and Disney own Star Wars. If EA fuck up badly enough, Disney can just pull the license, and the suddenness of EA's reversal on their Star Wars gacha is suggestive of that being basically what EA were really afraid of here.
Meanwhile, the temporary removal of gacha from SWBF2 seems to have some too late to prevent some sort of regulatory action, with French regulators also investigating whether gacha systems would require regulation or consumer protections. With Belgium also looking into regulating loot boxes, it's looking more and more like EA's unseemly over-reach on the issue may just have precipitated exactly the kind of regulatory response that they were desperate to avoid.
Meanwhile, SWBF2's is garnering pretty poor reviews across the board, with a Metacritic score of only 69, and a user score of only 0.8 (the original SWBF managed a MC score of 75, with an average user score of 3.5, by comparison). And, for a wonder, its sales appear to be following suit, actually reflecting of this poor critical and consumer reception, at least in the UK.
The Know has a decent roundup of the latest developments:
So, have gamers finally had enough of this shit? Are they finally voting with their feet and wallets? Only time will tell, but the fact that it's finally happened, even once, gives me hope for humanity.