I'm sure by now a lot of you have heard all the noise surrounding the release of Star Wars Battlefront II and inevitably the shitstorm EA has stirred up by requiring people to essentially "pay to win" or pay to unlock heroes and special abilities. Wall Street investors are beginning to be worried by the backlash surrounding the news that this is heavily encountered in the game (https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/15/wal...e-over-eas-star-wars-game-may-hurt-sales.html). It seems we've been living with this business model for a while on the sports sides of things. Ultimate team modes can be found in NHL, FIFA, Madden, 2k, The Show among others. These companies are certainly seeing the benefit of using this practice (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-03-01-eas-ultimate-team-now-worth-USD800-million-annually). What do you think this means for the future of ultimate team modes? Do you expect to see revenue increase from UT as it has lately, or will consumers change their approach moving forward?
I believe in pay to look cool but not pay to win. That's one reason why I like NHL Eashl because it's balanced gameplay
To put this in eashl terms think back to leveling your guy in older games. Add a ton of horizontal progression in the form of shitty cards that boost up stats then add vertical progression to make those cards better. Put all these things in loot boxes that cost 1000 eashl coins and you get eashl coins from time played in a game where a full game gives u 50 eashl coins(your goals/assists don't matter here) you can also BUY these eashl coins with your real money to get past this insane grind for coins. Also toss in all celebrations and equipment into these loot boxes and you can sell duplicates for 5 eashl coins.
Worst part are the poor kids who spend hundreds of dollars every year only for their cards to be worthless next release. UT worst thing to ever happen to sports gamers. Literally stunted the growth of our games.
This is completely false some people play NHL solely for HUT so I don't understand how it "stunted growth" maybe in EASHL terms but in the end of the day EA is trying to make money and they are just a company.
Just a matter of time before gaming gets regulated. I think Belgium already trying to regulate it bc of these gambling "loot" boxes. This shits been in sports games for a long time now with Ultimate/My team, just getting more press now since they are implementing it to other bigger and more mainstream games.
I know I got hooked on HUT in a bad way from NHL 11-14.. finally gave up on it for the most part by 15 and this year I have played 1 HUT game online. Glad I got hooked on it when I did because I was young (14-16) and spent like Christmas gift money on packs rather than money I need for bills now.
So, you can write all the essays you want about these subjects, it boils down to a few simple points. You can choose to play other games / game modes. You can choose to actually go through with the grind and feel rewarded. Everyone wants instant satisfaction, and these businesses are taking full advantage of it, and you can sit there and say EA SPORTS IS GREEDY AND DUMB AND I HATE IT. But guess what, until you see other gaming companies take over major sports titles and etc. this is going to continue to happen. The best statement you can make if this is a serious topic is to not buy the game to not financially invest in the game modes, but even then when you have people who work 9-5s to dump money into hut, it isn’t gonna change.
Isn't the whole point of companies to be making money? If I'm not mistaken, the most popular game in the world is actually free, so if you ain't happy with a certain game cause it costs money then just play something else?? I'm in the CoD community and yes it was annoying in Bo3 to die to a MSMC or a AN-94 remastered, but you can always kill those people anyways. If it actually enraged you that badly, you could always go play some GB's cause they were banned there anyways. Just like in NHL if you're a leaderboard kind of guy, there is always Online Versus. This year you can even just pick Team Canada every game if you're so scared that the other team might be better than yours. If you don't like pay to win game modes, play a different one. I don't see a problem. Let's ban casinos before we ban Loot Crates lol.
