National Post (National Edition)
GAMING WORLD REVOLTS OVER STAR WARS LATEST
OPPONENTS CAN EFFECTIVELY BUY THEIR WAY TO VICTORY
Electronic Arts is currently embroiled in the kind of controversy and consumer dissent that could ignite a galactic rebellion. The successful American video game publisher’s flagship title of the season, the online multiplayer shooter Star Wars Battlefront 2, will arrive in stores and be made available for online purchase across the world on Friday — and it is guaranteed to be greeted with more hostility than enthusiasm.
The blowback has already begun. With one vociferously loathed comment, the company has already made Reddit history when its reply to a complaint became the most down-voted contribution ever recorded on the website — a dubious but, in this case, telling distinction. At the time of writing, EA is engaged in a campaign of last-minute apologia and urgent damage control. The game itself is handsome and exhilarating. However, many may elect not to ever see it.
The problem concerns Battlefield’s elaborate ingame economy, which revolves, like the universal economy of the Star Wars films, around galactic credits. Credits are earned through play, and may be exchanged for items, upgrades, and more powerful “Hero” characters, such as Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. This credit system itself is not controversial: the game shares its basic system of progression and augmentation with any number of similar games. It may take time to earn the credits required to enjoy the most coveted prizes, but that’s precisely the point of such a method of challenge and reward.
However, Battlefield is somewhat unique for games of its kind in that its credits are available by other means — namely, they may be purchased in exchange for real money. Now, EA has attempted to camouflage this shortcut by devising certain barriers between credits and actual cash: one must buy “Crystals,” not credits, and crystals are exchanged for “Crates,” which contain an unknown assortment of items, power-ups and, indeed, a flat rate of credits, too. The ultimate effect of which is that players willing to spend money above and beyond the shelf price of Battlefront are afforded the opportunity to pay for concrete advantages in the game.
And that has aroused a maelstrom of dark-side fury. Serious competitive gamers object to the notion that their opponents can effectively buy their way to victory: it certainly diminishes the sense of fair play to imagine that the rival fighter sharpshooting you over and over again has simply shelled out for a superior gun. (It would be sort of like playing chess against someone who has paid for two or three additional queens.) The landscape of multiplayer video games is as deeply competitive — and therefore reliant on integrity and a level playing field — as any professional sport.
In short, these “microtransactions,” as the industry has come to refer to in-game purchases for real-world money, run the risk of spoiling the fun.
Consumers are also strongly offended by the premise of the back-end marketplace to begin with. Star Wars Battlefront 2 retails in Canada for $79.99 — no small price-tag for even a so-called triple-A entertainment. With such a high price of admission, it’s unfair, gamers say, to expect them to continue to pay once past the door. It would be one thing if the items available for purchase were merely cosmetic: gun decals, lavish costumes and ornaments for vehicles of the trivial kind have long been common upgrades for cash in games like these. But in the case of Battlefront, a wealth of intriguing content is only accessible to those who pay, or else devote hundreds of hours to their “manual” unlocking. Anyone enticed to buy Battlefront by the dream of playing as Luke Skywalker, for instance, will be disappointed to discover how much time it takes to acquire him — 126 hours for him alone, according to some estimates.
Of course, Battlefront’s economy is not entirely unprecedented, and Electronic Arts did not dream up this system to bilk its players out of money unfairly. Nobody, least of all EA, wants to hazard alienating its customer base to make a few extra bucks. This particular economy is just a present-day manifestation of a disease that’s plagued the industry for ages. The concept of postpurchase payments has been in the gaming air for more than a decade now. There are, as I see it, three main culprits.
For instance, there are massively multiplier online role-playing games, or MMORPGs, such as World of Warcraft and League of Legends, nearly all of which actively encourage players to spend money on attractive items for advantage in the game. (Such games typically charge a monthly subscription fee for continued access.) At the height of their popularity, from 2005 until about 2008, the developers were earning millions in ancillary sales, and even rapacious players themselves were in on the action, acquiring and re-selling on the black market. It proved most importantly the willingness of many people to spend a lot of money to improve the ease of their experience. And that is a willingness developers have only become more sophisticated at exploiting over time.
At roughly the same time, the smartphone app market, led by Apple and Android, drove down the perceived value of mobile games — the proliferation of free and $0.99 titles, most of them very poor quality, made it impossible for other mobile developers to make money distributing games for what they were actually worth. To make up for these losses, app developers turned instead to add-ons and in-game purchases: in hugely popular games like Candy Crush and Clash of Clans, the zero-dollar price-tag seduces people into playing before incentivizing them to pay into the game steadily one dollar at a time. This system, needless to say, has generated billions.
Finally, toward the end of the last decade, console gaming saw a sudden and widespread shift toward digital gaming — that is, toward the purchase and download of entire games online, from the proprietary markets Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony each facilitated. One of the most surprising consequences of this shift was the creation of premium “downloadable content,” or DLC: extra levels, items, characters and so forth for already existing, already popular games.
The original idea was to extend the life of games by allowing developers to extend their adventure months or even years after release. Instead, it swiftly became an avenue for exploitation — developers began to leave content out of their release product deliberately in order to charge gamers to access it long after the fact.
Throughout all of these developments, gamers have remained intensely skeptical about the motivations and effects. And that has come to a head with the implementation of the credits and crates system in Battlefront. EA has already teased forthcoming additional downloadable content for Battlefront. We know new heroes are on the horizon, available for credits or cash. And even in the short time the game has been available for select people to play in open beta, gamers believe they have been burned.
So it’s no surprise to learn that EA has issued a statement addressing the problems and, it hopes, resolving them. “Listening, and providing choices in how you play, will always be our principle with Star Wars Battlefront II,” says John Wasilczyk, executive producer at DICE, the developer behind the game.
“We want to ensure the game is balanced and fun both today and for years into the future.” As a result the studio has committed to slashing the credits needed to unlock its hero characters by 75 per cent at the time of launch. And there is a promise of more. “We’re going to keep making changes to improve the game experience over time,” he says. “We welcome the conversation.”
Let us hope they do.
RELIANT ON INTEGRITY AND A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD.