As reported by Kotaku:
EA is temporarily pulling the microtransactions from Star Wars Battlefront II, a shocking move that comes after days of zealous fan anger and just hours before the official launch of the game.
“We hear you loud and clear, so we’re turning off all in-game purchases,” wrote Oskar Gabrielson, GM of Battlefront II developer DICE, in a blog post this evening. “We will now spend more time listening, adjusting, balancing and tuning. This means that the option to purchase crystals in the game is now offline, and all progression will be earned through gameplay. The ability to purchase crystals in-game will become available at a later date, only after we’ve made changes to the game. We’ll share more details as we work through this.”You're reading that correctly -- they blinked. I guess CNN picking up the story was the final straw.
Even as a long-time Star Wars fan (I saw the original Star Wars in '77, back when it was still just called Star Wars, and long before Lucas' revisionist digital fuckery or those god-awful prequels), I was not interested in this game. I didn't play Star Wars Battlefront, because (a) I'm not a big FPS fan to start with, (b) I don't much care for MMOs, either, and (c) its total lack of a single-player story/campaign mode wasn't appealing at all, so the idea of buying a sequel to a game that I didn't care about wasn't something that I was ever going to consider. My objection to SWBF2's gacha wasn't motivated by any concern over how my personal experience with the game might be affected; I just hated the corporate greed and total bullshit on display on principle.
Time will tell if EA's disastrous foray into making a mediocre full-priced game much worse by adding free-to-play monetization will have any effect on the broader videogame industry; with regulators now awake to just how shitty this stuff can become, and already investigating the game that started it all, Activision Blizzard's Overwatch, we could have already passed a tipping point in which the AAA videogame industry actually backs away from an egregious bullshit practice due to its long-term costs, regardless of its short-term lucrativeness. Which is a rare occurrence in any industry, not just in videogames.
So I say, Huzzah! Let us celebrate our temporary, partial victory over the forces of the most banal of greedy and evil corporate practice. The fact that gamers have finally rallied to prove that there is a point when enough is e-fucking-nuff, even in videogames, is a good thing.