EA claims Star Wars Battlefront II’s business model aims to ‘provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment’

    
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Some awards, you do not want to win. The Darwin award, for example. Or “worst business model of the year.” Or “most downvoted comment of all time on Reddit because you have the worst business model of the year,” which EA managed to score this past weekend.

In response to players continuing to riot over Star Wars Battlefront II’s obnoxious business model – specifically, the part where people are upset that key characters are locked behind an additional paywall in a game they already paid $80 for – EA trotted out the old “sense of pride and accomplishment” line. Seriously. They said that. Out loud.

“The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes. As for cost, we selected initial values based upon data from the Open Beta and other adjustments made to milestone rewards before launch. Among other things, we’re looking at average per-player credit earn rates on a daily basis, and we’ll be making constant adjustments to ensure that players have challenges that are compelling, rewarding, and of course attainable via gameplay. We appreciate the candid feedback, and the passion the community has put forth around the current topics here on Reddit, our forums and across numerous social media outlets. Our team will continue to make changes and monitor community feedback and update everyone as soon and as often as we can.”

For this turd of a post, EA was rewarded with over 327,000 downvotes, apparently the most ever on Reddit. It’s still ticking up – er, down – as I type this.

And as MMORPG points out, EA didn’t stop there, as an EA community manager snarked on Twitter about “the arm chair developers on this internet.” Raise your hand if you’d rather be an armchair dev than the guy who has to market triple-dipping on an $80 video game as engendering a “sense of pride and accomplishment”!

Finally, since apparently it needs to be said, again, disagreeing with the professional conduct of a company does not give anybody carte blanche to harass individual developers. Don’t be that guy. Boycott the game and the company and complain about the policy; don’t take it out on random employees.

https://twitter.com/BiggSean66/status/930058496216670211

Source: Reddit, GIbiz. Cheers, Kinya!
Update Nov 15, 2017: You might notice that the tweet claiming to be from an EA employee has now vanished. Kotaku’s investigation into the alleged recipient of the death threats now suggests that something more nefarious was afoot in those tweets, as no one seems to be able to identify him to verify those threats or indeed whether he ever worked for EA. It is unclear whether he is a troll, an astroturfer, or something else entirely, but it does cast the ensuing debate in a new light.
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