An EA executive revealed about their future game developments that are influenced by controversies regarding Star Wars: Battlefront II.
It is one of the biggest games of EA that were released in 2017, and controversies regarding its microtransaction system even made headlines! So much so that people away from gaming circles have been talking about it as well!
Matt Bilbey, Vice President of strategic growth for EA said that this changed the outlook of his company regarding future games. This resulted in rebuilding the framework of designing and testing games under the directive named “EA moral compass”, said Bilbey.
I ran a team internally with EA chief design officer Patrick Soderlund post-Battlefront to actually redesign our game development framework and testing platforms to ensure we’re giving our game teams the right guidance–we’ll call it an EA moral compass–at the beginning of development so that we’re designing our live service early, we’re testing it early, testing it with gamers who are giving us feedback so we ensure those pillars of fairness, value, and fun are true. – Matt Bilbey, vice president of strategic growth for EA
At the E3 2018, the company disclosed that the experience in the follow-up of the release of Battlefront II was a major lesson for them regarding their methods on monetization.
The game’s design director Dennis Brannvall said that it was clear that they “didn’t get it quite right.” He added that the company had to hold themselves back from moving ahead like they wanted, and had to settle down with rethinking and ensuring the kind of games the enthusiasts actually expected.
Under the new directive of the EA moral compass, Battlefield V, EA’s next big game will feature loot boxes and season passes. Given that, experts believe that the game will still make vast amounts of money after the initial sale. EA has faith in the cosmetics that will come with the game, which the players can acquire by purchasing.
The EA controversy concerned with Battlefront II was that the loot box had perks affecting the gameplay, which made the game provide a pay-to-win scenario. EA and other developers will now make sure that there are only cosmetics to purchase in the future games.
