Considering EA initially stated that the removal was only temporary, it should perhaps come as no surprise that it is now reinstating microtransactions in Star Wars: Battlefront II. Gamers should be proud of the stink they kicked up though, as the game sold a million fewer copies than it was expected to.
Battlefront II has been highlighted by many as one of the most egregious examples of in-game gambling mechanics, dressed up as fun, ever. It leveraged paid for loot boxes, multiple in-game currencies, random drops, card mechanics, boosted stats for paying players and so much more that meant it encouraged you to spend money and made it harder to play if you didn't. It was terrible and gamers all over the world complained, stopped paying, stopped playing and more importantly, didn't buy it in the first place.
The end result of that campaign was for EA to pull the real-money payment options from the game, albeit temporarily, ostensibly to try and figure out a better way to implement them. While we knew that meant it would come back when some of the bad PR died down, what we didn't know was whether it would be taken seriously by EA. You have to imagine that now that the game has sold a million fewer copies than expected, something will change.
At least we hope so.
Hopefully, sales continue to be slow and when real-money transactions do return to the game in the "next few months," that people will avoid them like the plague. The less money that is made from them, the less likely they are to be reimplemented in future titles.
