By MarcoCocomello at Wednesday, November 29, 2017 9:16:00 AM





Some people are calling it EA's day of reckoning as it seems shareholders in EA Games are running for the hills after the recent controversy surrounding Star Wars: Battlefront 2's nasty microtransactions. The company's profitable business model is at risk after angry gamers revolted against the game and its in-game purchases.

EA stock is down 8.5 percent month to date as of yesterday wiping out $3.1 billion of shareholder value. Its competition, however, Take-Two and Activision Blizzard are up 5 percent at the same time. EA recently gave its quarterly sales forecast which was slightly below Wall Street estimates on 31 October 2017 and some analysts suspect it was due to the Star Wars game. The next day, shares fell 4 percent.

Star Wars: Battlefront 2 is also not selling well as the game's sales are down 61 percent compared to the 2015 release. The game has even failed to make it onto the top 100 list of Amazon's best-selling video games of the year, and that is quite bad considering there cannot be 100 games that are better than it in 2017. One Wall Street analyst is not happy with the state of EA's stock.

"We were underwhelmed by sell-through for Star Wars: Battlefront II (EA) over the Black Friday weekend, which follows a controversial launch for the game," Stifel analyst Drew Crum wrote in a note to clients Sunday.

But this does more than just show EA with mud on its face as it now puts microtransactions and the strategy of them in question going forward. Are they worth the risk as Battlefront 2 has proven that gamers will simply not only just stay away from them, but if your game relies on them too heavily they will just not buy the game.

With all the pressure from the world and the gaming community, all we can hope is that EA has learnt their lesson, I doubt it but $3 billion is a lot of money to gamble with. They know how it feels now when we have to pay for a box that contains random loot.

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