Jim Serling, a popular YouTuber that is not exactly known for curbing his tongue, recently uploaded a new video that goes after Electronic Arts and their “microtransaction only” approach for all future titles. This accusation isn’t unfounded, as the company’s CFO himself has stated numerous times that microtransactions will be featured in all future titles. This mindset was also behind the tragic closing of Visceral Studios, thus canning their beautiful linear, narrative driven Star Wars games because EA stated “no one wants” those.
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In Sterling’s latest video, he goes after EA’s recent proposal for unfair matchmaking to raise “player engagement” and monetization. This was a huge controversy with Star Wars Battlefront II. Microtransactions and loot boxes are nothing new – and to be fair, can actually be a game within a game when done correctly (Overwatch, for example), but when publishers start taking a Pay to Win approach, as they did with Battlefront, that’s when players and industry folk alike began to fight back.
This latest video, and proposal goes hand in hand with those pay-to-win accusations. With buffs to multiplayer matches available (behind pay walls, of course), players could effectively by their way to a better position in-game; moving focus beyond skill and reliant on paid bonuses instead. Sterling talks just that in his video, seen above, as he goes into why EA has become such a manipulative power house in the gaming market. “Activision’s not the only company set to innovatively exploit its player base going forward. EA’s love of dynamic difficulty and plans for “unfair” PvP matchmaking sheds yet more light on what the “AAA” industry has planned for us.”
Both Sterling and fellow YouTuber YongYea have a paper trail to support these accusations, including an ACM Digital Library report titled “Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment for Maximized Engagement in Digital Games,” which Sterling explains gives players a false sense of achievement and building up a faux bond between player and buffs. The ACM report was headed by many different EA figure heads. Essentially, this is the proof that many needed to the opposite end of the spectrum where gamers think the “year of the loot box” are all in are heads and it’s “not that big of a deal.”
Watch the video above to see more about how this move into mandatory microtransactions is become more and more real with every title released.
