Today is the official release of Star Wars: Battlefront II, the sequel to the 2015 reboot of the franchise that lets you fight the movies' epic battles as a foot soldier, Empire or Rebel as you please. But the news leading up to its release hasn't been about the graphics or gameplay so much as rabid player backlash to an annoying feature that now, on launch day, has been removed: Microtransactions.

Microtransactions, which allow (or arguably force) players to buy small in-game features on top of the game's purchase price, are nothing new. But Battlefront II's caught flak starting last week for having particularly egregious ones. The basic premise works like this: By playing multiplayer matches, players could earn credits, which could be spent on randomized 'loot boxes' (which can also be found in Blizzard's Overwatch) or used to purchase hero characters, like Darth Vader and Skywalker. Alternatively, players could also just buy an in-game crystal currency with real money, and skip the arduous multiplayer grind.



While this choice is not uncommon in modern gaming, the ire really started to heat up once players started doing the math, ultimately coming to the conclusion that unlocking all of the game's features would take 4,528 hours or $2,100 in paid currency. Suffice it to say, an absurd bit of investment. It lead to a lot of outrage, including the new record-holder for Reddit’s most downvoted comment in history.

Following the backlash, Battlefront II's publisher EA made a few changes to attempt to re-balance the game, initially by reducing the cost of hero characters. But now the ability to buy real-money crystals has been temporarily removed for the game’s launch. While this may be directly due to player backlash, there’s another issue at play. Just as the push-back was reaching its peak, news broke that the Belgian Gaming Commission is investigating randomized, buyable loot boxes as a form of unregulated gambling, giving official form to a question that has also been raised in the United States, but which North American Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) has so far dismissed.

Players’ rage at the ugly value proposition of these microtransactions may be the driving force behind the public relations firestorm Star Wars: Battlefront II is currently enduring but it seems more than likely that the factor that ultimately tipped the scales is a fear of regulatory action. After all, while microtransactions have existed for years, they have never been so hotly contested or widely discussed as they are right now, which makes it an especially bad time to fly under the radar with ones that are arguably a form of unregulated gambling.

The removal of the feature is temporary according to EA, but its reinstitution may hinge on factors far outside players opinions. The randomized loot box is becoming more and more of a staple of modern gaming. The question is how much father it can get without meeting legal resistance.

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