News Comment 13: Star Wars BAttlefront 2
For today’s news comment I’m taking a look to a game that will be released tomorrow (Friday the 17th of November).
The game is Battlefield 2 is a basically a Star Wars based game where you take military like battles into a Star Wars context. so instead of solider we have storm troopers, the rebellion, Jedi, Sith and different characters from the movies. What makes this games news is not the content of the game but how you get the content. Basically the standard mode of game is that the player is in an online battle. As thousand of games, this game needs in game credits to unlock new weapons and characters. In this case you need in game credits or micro-transactions (real money) to actually get the denominated ”heroes” (this would be playing with Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Han Solo, etc.) In the original version of the game released for those player who bought the pre release package that allows them to play a week before the game is released they found something interesting. To unlock one of this characters it would take 60,000 in game credits or 40 hours of continuing gameplay just to buy one character. Others estimated that even with playing for two hours a day it would take 2 years to get all the characters in the game without paying for extra in game coins that would be with actual money.
This cause and incredible concern among the gamer community and the media backlash made EA (Electronic Arts) back down and make reduce by 75 % the amount of credits that it would take to get these heroes.
I believe this is an interesting case of one of those games that gamer call “pay to win” where because of the regulation of the game there is no way you can improve in the game without paying extra money; and considering the game is already worth $60 it’s not a great thing. I get it, the game industry is made to get money but when it gets to these extremes where basically players are forced to pay it’s just absurd. it has been a couple of years since games start to come in pieces. it’s like going to McDonald’s and getting a burger for the regular price but only receiving the bread and some lettuce. and when you complain the manager says the meat and the rest would be an extra 5 dollars. I don’t know if anyone would be happy with that. luckily the company proceeded to reduce the prices which are still considerably high! but it shows that people can actually make a difference on these days. and this is the point that I really wanted to prove. If people get together for one greater good these days, it feels like a machine that can’t stop.