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About the lootboxes in Battlefront 2 of course.

We should probably update the Star Wars Battlefront entry to add this.

this comment wasnt buried
it was smashed into the fucking concrete

It currently rests in the Earth's core.

To think that i was one step to buying that shiny turd of a game…

Seriously, 40 hours to unlock Darth Vader? No, EA, i'll pass.

>409k downvotes
congrats EA u did something that will NEVER be done again!

24 hours passed a short while ago.

That's 400k+ in less than a day.

Impressive record

No, it's smashed up to the Chinese mainland.

Can we get a million downvotes?

BUT THE REAL QUESTION REMAINS, CAN THE COMMENT REACH A MILLION DOWNVOTES????

Place your bets, I'm betting 100 upvotes

All the way to the floor?

A comment with over half a million downvotes is way beyond the floor at this point. It's at the center of the earth.

So there's a mass rumor that EA removed the refund button and now you gotta call EA customer service to get a refund.

This seems to be half-truths. The refund button isn't there, but it wasn't there in the first place. Origins doesn't allow you to cancel orders or get refunds until 7 days before a game is set to come out. You have the option to cancel early through customer service, which is leading many to think it's the only way to cancel their orders and causing this new PR mess.

It's an example of EA being too cocky that nobody would want to cancel their orders early and it bitting them in the ass for their laziness.

So apparently Europe is investigating Battlefront 2, Overwatch and other games for gambling.
I don't want to say "I told you this would happen" but "I told you this would happen".

So the Dutch government has joined the Belgium government in investigating into whether or not lootboxes are gambling. Why is this a big deal? All that needs to happen is one country to determine it's gambling to set off a clusterfuck of a situation.

How bad do I think this is going to get? Welllll…. Imagine Call of Duty, Star Wars, Overwatch, PUBG, Destiny 2, Rainbow Six, CSGO, EVE online all getting slapped with the "Adults Only" rating system.

I don't think this is going to be anywhere near a video crash or anything of the sort, but it is however going to be a severe crisis for the video game industry. Imagine every copy of Overwatch being pulled from Walmart, cause Walmart will not carry AO games; that's going to cause some severe problems for Blizzard.
Before you go "but companies wouldn't pull adults only games from shelves" they've done it before dozens of times, they'll do it again.

I kind of want it to happen though. I hate to take the games away from the kids, but "loot boxes" and "gacha-pon" like game system needs to die in the fire. Might not make news over there, but over here in the east, stories of children overspending on mobile game gacha to get those "only 500 copies exist in game" items and saddle their parents with heavy debt when the phone bill comes.

I am not talking $100-$200. I am talking $5.000 and beyond; and not just kids, some adults without self-control also fell victim. It has been problem to a point that government has to make rules about it, iirc 5 loot boxes and you can get a single copy whatever you wish for in those boxes in case you shit out of luck. A temporary compromise, but it will not stop the whales and the over-spenders much.

In letter, whether is it gambling or not is still up in the air for me; but in spirit, it is gambling for me. Also, like I said, I do not want to games away from kids either; so I think the best solution would be to continue the service but ditch those bollocks permanently like how Diablo 3 ditched real-money auction house.

@Clownfish
The problem with the video game industry is they're not ready for if this happens and would not believe it until a month after it happened.

What do I mean by this? Well simply put there's some video game industries that genuinely believe they're too big as a company to fail. This completely contradicts how some companies are two or three projects away from severe financial problems. If video games that have lootboxes got slapped with the "Adults Only" rating you would see a lot of companies that would genuinely think it wasn't happening, they would only get a dose of reality until they physically walked down to Walmart to see their game being pulled off the shelf by employees.

@YourHigherBrainFunctions
If that happens, I will bake a cake and some brownies to celebrate the death of crony video game industries and from its ashes will rise a small-medium game industry like the early 90s and Playstation 1 era once more.

I remember the Best Friends Zaibatsu have talked about this issue before, and they've brought up talks and papers about "Whales" who spend thousands of dollars on these kind of games, how just a few Whales can keep even an unpopular game profitable, and how the numbers suspiciously line up with the numbers to gambling addiction.

Personally, I do think lootboxes are gambling, and the whole thing needs to die because it, along with Pay-to-win/pay-to-unlock shit faster needs to die because it is legitimately starting to kill the Video Game industry.

I spent $100 in one go on Pokemon Shuffle once, in order to get past a few stages because the difficulty became nigh-on impossible without any power-ups to help you, and guess what you could buy for only a few bucks? It was after I only got a few stages forward that I had my realization of what I've done, and I haven't touched the game in over a year.
These things are designed from the very foundation to be money leeches, and inconspicuous ones at that. You don't know how much you've spent until you look back at your transaction history and see the big ugly number right there. And if Battlefront II and EA being the reason for not only lootboxes, but pay-to-win/pay-to-play games get investigated and shut down immediately, I won't see it as a big loss.
These games are manipulative and evil and deserve to all burn in a garbage pit for all I care. If it hurts the industry, that is a horrible shame, but it was a preventable one. In other words

So EA has pulled the microtransactions.

What probably happened was:
"Yay this is the future of gaming"
governments thinking about classifying it as gambling
"Oh shit this might tank dozens of AAA companies"

They haven't pulled them.
They explicitly said that they will turn back on "at a later date", which literally leaves them a large enough window to turn them back on at release.

Being Dutch, I haven't read about this yet; while I'm someone who follows the news quite tightly.

Got links?

https://www.nu.nl/games/5009924/nederlandse-kansspelautoriteit-onderzoekt-lootboxen-in-games.html

I managed to find one, but the site looks unsavoury as hell. No weird things, just cluttered design.

Holy shitake mushrooms.

I was reading a legal breakdown of what would happen if the international gambling commission or if any country ruled that this was gambling. Simply put from a technical level it's HIGHLY likely that rather than having to deal with tens of millions of dollars in lawyer fees and shit Disney would more than likely just axe their contract with EA entirely. Disney would probably just buy out a video game studio for future games instead.

What is worse is that companies with games with online multiplayer would have to post their lootbox droprates publicly monthly and monthly answer to the gambling commission so as to make sure they're not taking advantage of consumers. It is highly unlikely that we would see a video game industry crash from this. HOWEVER if this was deemed to be gambling the most likely outcome of this is that chances are hundreds of video game companies would axe online multiplayer in games rather than having to answer to the international gambling commission m.o.n.t.h.l.y. This won't just hurt EA, but the entire video game industry.

If this is determined to be gambling the amount of financial damage this would do would be so severe that chances are really damn high nobody will do business with them ever again.
EA, "Let me make a spiderman game"
Disney, "Get the fuck out of here before I call the cops!"

>the most likely outcome of this is that chances are hundreds of video game companies would axe online multiplayer in games rather than having to answer to the international gambling commission m.o.n.t.h.l.y. This won’t just hurt EA, but the entire video game industry.

But only for the games with lootboxes, not every single multiplayer game.

@YourHigherBrainFunctions
Live up to your namesake now and cease panicking. It is the lootbox, not video game that is under scrutiny or will be under strict law if it passes. We are just going to say goodbye to that scummy business pratice.

再見 motherfucker!!

Their mobile version is cleaner, but yeah that's nu.nl for ya. They're valid, so that's what matters.

To translate it a bit: Over here, gambling games require a license if there's money or a price to gain, but for lootboxes there is no licensing system yet (otherwise it's an offense and sanctions may follow).

Now here's the interesting part: Lootbox games can potentially become forbidden until we have a law that clearly classifies them. Such a law was accepted in 2016, but is currently is sitting in a state of purgatory (to put into bastardized terms, it needs to pass our version of Congress). The article doesn't specify what said law covers, so don't quote me on this.

To be clear, lootbox games aren't classified as gambling yet. They're researching it. While they may become classified as such, they can also be given the "in-game purchases" warning appstore apps have.

I see. Thank you for the information.

Lootboxes used to not be a thing in Video Games and they did just fine. Unchecked absolute greed is what's pushed Lootboxes as the new standard in Video games. Even shadow of war had lootboxes for its Single Player game experience. If all of that disappeared suddenly, I wouldn't shed a single tear for its parting.

god bless

I got into the weird part of YouTube while organising my old songs playlists and stumbled upon this.

Someday it might reach 1 million downvotes and that inspires me. When people work together they can accomplish wonderful things

On the topic of loot boxes, Belgium has declared them to be a form of gambling and wants them banned in Europe

I would have thought they were just going to ban pay to win.

Holy shit is this going to go down hard.

State of Hawaii also announces action to address "predatory practices" at EA and other companies in reply to Star Wars.

Normally I loath happening reactions, but yeah this is happening.

Normally I am against the goverment regulating videogames in general but I refuse to defend EA in any way, they are on their own and It makes me happy cause they ruin dungeon keeper.

The Victorian Gambling Authority also has something to say about loot boxes, calling them a form of gambling

It's the beginning of the end for EA and many other publishers that do this

After all of this "lootboxes with gambling", idk if this controversy will affect the CS:GO Gambling Scandal or not

The user score form Metacritic is currently less than FUCKING 1!

And that's just for the PC version:

PS4 – 0.9
Xbox One – 0.5

I don't know what's worse, Big Rigs or this game.

The user score for Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing is 3.7 so that has the better user score than any of the three versions for Battlefront II.

It will; it's not just going to effect Battlefront II, but also overwatch, tf2 and cs:go. Overwatch is also being investigated and their lootboxes are purely cosmetic. If they're going after cosmetic items also then that's goign to be bad for everyone.

EA didn't just stick their hand too far in the cookie jar, they unzipped their pants and started using it to pleasure themselves then acted like it was reasonable behavior when everyone was mortified at what they were doing.

Maybe eventually EA would be considered gamblers.

That's why I don't run a country, everything would be done via gambling on sims 3 savefiles.

Australia considers lootboxes gambling too.

Governments vs EA (circa 2017 colorized)

So some things. First off, journalists are calling gamers entitled and say they deserve to get microtransactioned, and charged even more money for games on top of microtransactions, because games are the "cheapest form of media".

Apparently EA's investors are throwing a conniption fit over the fact they can't get gambling money from people who already bought the game. EA issued a statement in which they said, the loss of micro-transactions will not affect their projected earnings for Star Wars Battlefront II by any significant amount.

So essentially, EA just confirmed that microtransactions aren't needed for their games to break even or make profit. Much like the microtransactions themselves, they're put in there for purely cosmetics.

games are the “cheapest form of media”.

That's demonstratably wrong though, full priced games cost $50 while movie tickets usually run $7-10. Of course this isn't the first time the media has bold faced lied about video games.