Star Wars Battlefront 2: Did EA’s Corporate Greed Ruin a Perfect Game?

Alex Volkerijk, Writer

Star Wars Battlefront 2, the video game developed by Dice and published by EA games, is the subject of much controversy. The franchise of games was originally made in the early 2000s for Playstation 2 and the first Xbox, and has been adored for many years. With Disney acquiring Lucasfilm in 2012, Disney licensed the rights to all Star Wars video games to the controversial video game company Electronic Arts. Their first Battlefront game in 2015 received very mixed reviews, and many fans were hoping for the perfect successor to the beloved franchise.

Battlefront 2 has been highly anticipated by many for quite some time now. Promising to improve upon the mistakes of 2015’s Battlefront in every aspect of the game, fans were very excited for the new entry to the franchise. However, Electronic Arts’s controversial business tactics have left many with a very bad taste in their mouth.

The quality of the game is up for the players to decide themselves, but no matter how it’s perceived, the game’s quality is overshadowed by a pay-to-win system of loot boxes and micro-transactions  (paying real money to unlock better in-game content faster) that cause the online multiplayer modes to become unbalanced. Many are also calling the loot boxes a system of child gambling, as children can spend real money on loot boxes that may or may not give you anything worth that real money. However, it is not officially considered gambling, because players will always receive gear from loot box purchases.

All of the in-game items, like upgrades for your soldiers and cosmetic items, are unlocked by randomized loot boxes. This means that the rarer and more powerful items in the game are harder to get. However, if someone were to spend real money on these, the chances of getting higher quality gear are almost guaranteed. Paying real money for the loot boxes allows the player to have an advantage in the game over players who can’t afford to pay extra for gear. This basically comes down to getting very lucky with the small amount of free loot boxes or paying for them if you want to advance in the game. As a result, players claim that the multiplayer is unbalanced in a way that pushes them to spend more money on a $60 game in order to have a fair shot at winning. 

This outraged a great deal of players. Some called for boycotts and many cancelled their orders of the game. Overall, this controversy just adds more dirt to an already not-so-clean record for EA. Some have even gone over the heads of EA and petitioned Lucasfilm and Disney to revoke EAs rights to the Star Wars franchise. With the release of a new movie and Disney’s clean and family-friendly reputation, allegations of supporting child gambling are not what they need right now. The future of the Star Wars video game franchise is now uncertain.