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Pachter: “Loot Box Debacle will Influence EA’s Behavior”

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The final piece on the Star Wars: Battlefront II loot box saga is finally here, ladies and gentlemen. Electronic Arts saw a lot of controversy this month alone, from closing down Visceral Games to a big scandal that saw government concern. This made a huge dent into Electronic Arts’ stock and it seems like this will be an influence for future practices.

According to our favorite Webdush Securities analyst, Michael Pachter, EA’s stock price drop comes as major competitors’ shares have gone up, and the overall market is up. He is confident that the whole Loot Box debacle will influence EA’s behavior.

In the interview he had with Polygon a few days ago, Pachter describes that EA got ahead of itself in presuming that MTX [microtransactions] would work equally well in all games. He made a comparison with the Loot Boxes in Battlefront 2 to those offered in Need for Speed: Payback.

Pachter also brings the Ultimate Team modes in EA Sports games. Which actually delivered over $800 Million USD in revenue annually. “In FIFA, the single-player game allows access to all players, and only the Ultimate Team multiplayer mode requires card collection,” Pachter said.

“The same is true of [Grand Theft Auto 5] vs. GTA Online, with the former having all content available and the latter (multiplayer) creating items for MTX purchases.”

However, reality changes once we focus on Star Wars: Battlefront 2, which has player progression influenced by the acquisition of Loot Boxes. This makes the game a pay to win scheme that relies on a huge game of chance.

Pachter mentions the fact that Overwatch has a better chance than Battlefront II because of the skins. While it may be a good point, I completely disagree, as the first Star Wars: Battlefront game had customization options for characters and heroes.

“I’m quite confident that this debacle will influence EA’s future behavior,” Pachter said. “Management will take this seriously, and will endeavor to handle MTX more elegantly in the future.” And we can certainly hope this is the case, hopefully with a better established regulation.

I always wanted to be a journalist who listens. The Voice of the Unspoken and someone heavily involved in the gaming community. From playing as a leader of a competitive multi-branch team to organizing tournaments for the competitive scene to being involved in a lot of gaming communities. I want to keep moving forward as a journalist.

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Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made

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As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.

Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.

Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”

You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.

 

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You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5

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You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.

The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.

The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.

The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.

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This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive

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Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.

For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”

Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.

Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.

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