It’s no secret that loot boxes and microtransactions in video games have been some of the hottest topics these past months. While everyone is expressing their opinion on the matter, fans have started asking whether Anthem, the new IP Electronic Arts has announced in E3 2017 will implement such methods. Bioware, the game’s development team, answered and tried to ease those concerns saying that “nothing is set in stone”.
With games like Middle Earth: Shadow of War and Star Wars: Battlefront II having included such features in their gameplay and the companies’ turn to microtransactions to raise their sales, it’s hard not to think that any major title getting released now by major publishers will suffer the same. Anthem, which is currently described as the EA answer to Destiny, is a title that may benefit from microtransactions but this policy isn’t something that fans like to hear about. A former BioWare developer, Manveer Heir, recently criticized the microtransactions that EA uses saying the following:
The problem is that we’ve scaled up our budgets to $100m+ and we haven’t actually made a space for good linear single-player games that are under that. But why can’t we have both? Why does it have to be one or the other? And the reason is that EA and those big publishers in general only care about the highest return on investment. They don’t actually care about what the players want, they care about what the players will pay for.
After that, Brenon Holmes, Creative Director at BioWare, gave his team’s point of view through comments in a Reddit discussion named “Worried About the Potential For Toxic “Loot Box” Economy in Anthem”. He assured fans that the developer team of Anthem is a team full of gamers who share similar views on monetization policies. Even though the possibility of microtransactions is still on the table, the team will discuss it a lot before making a decision.
Anthem is a huge sci-fi title coming from EA and the possibility of it not having microtransactions is close to none. Even though we may still have to face players spending hundreds of dollars to get cool loot, its a breath of fresh air hearing that the developers share the same concerns as we do, especially when it comes to single-player games that have nothing to do with being more powerful than other players.
