Ironically, EA and SW:BF2 will avoid Belgian censure, "since at the time of the survey, EA had temporarily removed microtransactions from the game." MTs have since been added back into SW:BF2, but they're not tied to gambling mechanics anymore, and therefore don't break Belgian law. Which means that EA, having thoroughly shit the loot box bed, have completely ruined the fun for everybody else while dodging the fines and other penalties. Huzzah!
Still, if you were wondering if the loot box furor had died down... it hasn't. At all. And I have a feeling that it will be a long, long time before AAA videogame publishers attempt this particular trick again.
Q: How badly did EA miss the mark with Star Wars: Battlefront 2's loot box-driven progression mechanics?
A: Badly enough that the Netherlands is not only banning loot boxes, but urging other EU nations to do the same... after EA decoupled SW:BF2's progression system from its monetization system.
Yes, "gacha" mechanic regulations aren't just coming, they're here, and they're spreading. And while EA isn't the only "loot box" offender, their pairing of gacha mechanics with the Star Wars license, just weeks before The Last Jedi hit theatres, managed to garner a degree and intensity of negative PR that practically begged to be restricted. Good job, EA. GG.
Oh, and that ruling that's referred to? Not only did it find four games as being "in direct contravention of the Betting and Gaming Act" (FIFA 18, Dota 2, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, and Rocket League are supposedly the games in question), it also defined what sort of loot box mechanics violate the law:
I hated to see loot boxes proliferating in AAA videogames, mainly because (as you know) I hate to see bad corporate behaviour rewarded with boatloads of cash... and "gacha" games do rake in metric tonnes of the stuff. So it's good to see bad loot box behaviour finally being penalized, instead. It remains to be seen if the AAA video game industry will actually learn a fucking lesson from all this, of course, but one can always hope.
This story is, obviously, blowing up right now, but it looks like PC Gamer gets first post:
Last week, Belgium's Gaming Commission announced that it had launched an investigation
into whether the loot boxes available for purchase in games like
Overwatch and Star Wars Battlefront 2 constitute a form of gambling.
Today, VTM News reported that the ruling is in, and the answer is yes.
The Google translation
is a little sloppy, as usual, but the message is clear enough. "The
mixing of money and addiction is gambling," the Gaming Commission
declared. Belgium's Minister of Justice Koen Geens also weighed in,
saying, "Mixing gambling and gaming, especially at a young age, is
dangerous for the mental health of the child."
Geens, according to the report, wants to ban in-game purchases outright (correction: if you don't know exactly what you're purchasing), and not just in
Belgium: He said the process will take time, "because we have to go to
Europe. We will certainly try to ban it.
Folks, we won. After Belgium confirmed last week that it would be investigating charges of unregulated gambling in popular video games such as Overwatch, thanks to the Star Wars Battlefront 2 controversy, they have come out with their decision- loot boxes are indeed gambling, they say, and they will move to have them banned in the European Union.
This is fantastic news for multiple reasons- if loot boxes are illegal in Europe, then publishers will have two options- either develop two versions of their games (one with loot boxes, one without), or forego a release in Europe (therefore, half the market for most western publishers) entirely. Therefore, unless publishers literally want to spend the money on balancing and QAing two progression paths for their games, they will have no chance but to remove loot boxes from their titles- if this regulation passes.
That, "folks, we won," at the start of GamingBolt's post may turn out to be the most important part of this story. This really is a case of consumers banding together, and staying together, to generate sustained public pressure and bring about change, in a gaming community that has famously been unable to do any of those things until five minutes ago. Gamers have finally realized that they have the power in this relationship, and can force the big AAA publishers to back down on issues that really matter to them, and this is unlikely to be the last time it happens, either.
When I first heard that EA had announced the temporary removal of gacha monetization from Star Wars Battlefront II, my immediate knee-jerk reaction was, "I'll bet that someone from Disney made a phone call," and I wasn't the only one. EA, after all, was clearly intending to weather the storm and cash in on the game's gacha, but Disney was facing a wave of negative Star Wars-related PR with The Last Jedi's release only a month away; the reversal really only made sense if it happened at Disney's instigation.
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.
[...]
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.
It finally happened: after weeks of controversy, days of full-blown, outrage-driven consumer revolt, and yesterday's news that their bullshit business practices have prompted an investigation (with possible fines and/or straight-up banning of their product) in Belgium, a AAA videogame publisher has actually decided that the lure of filthy lucre just isn't worth it. For now, anyway.
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.
After making headlines on gaming blogs, web sites, and YouTube channels for the last few months, it seems that the growing backlash over video game "gacha" (a.k.a. "loot boxes") has attracted the regulatory attention that it richly deserves, as reported by Kotaku:
Peter
Naessens, General Director of the commission, says that the practice of
buying the add-on boxes—where you don’t know what you’re paying for
until you open it—may constitute gambling.
It’s a particular concern for the Commission when the game is available for and marketed towards children, like Overwatch and Battlefront II are (in Europe both titles have a PEGI rating of 12).
This isn't the first regulatory or legislative attention the loot boxes have received, but it is the first time I've seen that any country is looking to regulate gacha in much the same way that they regulate casinos. And with videogame consumers' reactions to gacha becoming increasingly negative and increasingly intense, it's starting to look as it AAA game publishers' "gold rush" mentality towards free-to-play gacha systems in full-priced videogame releases may be as short-lived as it was short-sighted... however lucrative it may have been in the near term.
Although the discussion was civil, the developers were unable to stray
much from the party line. Of the hundreds of questions posed, only 30
were answered and the topic of pay-to-win in a competitive multiplayer
title were skillfully evaded.
[...]
One of the highest-rated questions in the AMA, from user Jimquisition, went unanswered:
"Do
you not feel loot box design is inherently predatory by nature? They
exploit addiction and encourage at least the simulated feel of gambling,
despite the lack of legal definition. Is this not a concern for the
industry going forward?
"What exactly prompted you to
take Battlefront II on a path that was inevitably going to be slammed as
a “pay to win” experience, did you not feel it was particularly
insulting to try and make so much money from this game after the first
Battlefront was admittedly rushed and incomplete?
"They
say games are too expensive to make and that’s why they need season
passes, DLC, deluxe editions, microtransactions, and loot boxes (to say
nothing of merchandise, tax breaks, and sponsorship deals). Can you
honestly tell me that a Star Wars game was too expensive to make? That
you couldn’t have made a Star Wars game, as in a game about Star Wars,
and that it would not conceivably sell enough to make its money back
without all these additional monetization strategies? Should you be in
this business if you cannot affordably conduct business?"
Thank God for Jim Fucking Sterling Son. Also, I'll just add that the whole point of a Reddit Ask Me Anything is that Redditors get to ask you anything... and get answers. If you're going to duck and ignore questions, then there's no point to adopting the AMA format, is there?
But I digress. The point is that this sort of shit is... well, shit, and potentially very harmful to anyone with poor impulse control skills, including the children at whom the gacha-laden games are obviously aimed. And people outside of videogame fandom and punditry really are taking notice.