EA Will Bring In-Game Sales Back into Star Wars Battlefront 2 Soon

Star Wars Battlefront 2, despite all the controversy surrounding it, sold better than you or I would have liked. That said, even though it was a best-seller in December and sold well over 9 million units, that’s not nearly enough as far as EA is concerned - they had planned to sell 10 million units before the end of the year and had hoped to exceed the 13 million copies the first DICE-lead Battlefront managed to hit.

And while CFO Blake Jorgensen has admitted to the Wall Street Journal that the controversy surrounding the loot boxes are the main reason they failed to meet their mark; he also admitted that the company would be re-implementing a in-game payment system sometime “in the next few months,” or, more precisely, “when we think it’s ready.”

While I would never sympathize with EA, it’s clear at this exact moment they’re trapped between a rock and a hard place. The reputation of Battlefront 2 has been so immensely spoiled they couldn’t hope to salvage it and get the 4+ million sales they need to consider the game a success, which means if they’re going to make any money off this failed adventure, their only choice is to milk the people who are willing to be milked. So while the move might seem baffling, I would argue there’s a certain twisted logic to it.

How exactly they plan to re-introduce microtransactions is still up in the air. It seems unlikely they would go back to the old system of paying for gameplay boosts, and yet the company had already dismissed the possibility of cosmetics. So if nothing else, it’ll be interesting to see what EA manages to pull out of their butt in order to ‘rescue’ this.

Part of me suspects—although this is by no means verified—that this is part of the reason Anthem is being postponed. The two are being made by different studios, of course, but if EA discovers a microtransaction system that works in Battlefront 2, they might want time to implement it into Anthem.

That’s just pure speculation on my part, I remind you.